Nothing Like Blood (2 page)

“You think the police are satisfied?” asked Carolus when the door was shut.

“I have no means of knowing. They made very thorough interrogations before the inquest. They kept me for nearly half an hour. Very politely, I must say, but they did not mean to miss a thing. We have not seen anything of them since, but that is not to say they regard the case as closed, is it?”

“No. They have patience. Suppose that, when I've read your journal, I am interested. What are the chances of my being able to stay in the house?”

“There must be a room, because Christine Derosse has moved into Sonia's room—the one they call the room in the tower. The room she had before that must be unoccupied. But whether Mrs Derosse would let you have it or not, I don't know. She might be glad to do so.”

“I have nothing to do for the rest of the holidays,” said Carolus. “I want to give the Sticks a rest.”

“Then shut your house and come. I think it will interest you, anyway. And if you find nothing,
that
would be a change, wouldn't it, after all your gory adventures?”

“It would be most refreshing. You say the people who watched this woman from the boat said she seemed to
dive
from the balcony. That's a curious word to use. Was there water directly below it?”

“At high tide, yes. But the tide was low. She fell on the rocks. Killed instantly.”

“Could she possibly have thought the sea was up?”

“No. I am told that is impossible. She knew the place well and even at high tide the water barely covered the rocks and certainly was not deep enough for a dive from that height. And she was fully dressed. Yet the people watching are positive that she was alone on the balcony. They had been observing her sitting on the parapet brightly framed in the window. The lights in the room behind her shone out.”

“Curious,” said Carolus. “What about these people who saw it?”

“Holiday-makers. A couple from the holiday camp along the coast. Moonlight-boating.”

“Oh. There was moonlight?”

“Yes. I understand so. I don't remember it myself. But the police took the couple out in a boat to what they estimated was the same spot and the lights in the room were turned on. No one knows what they think but their evidence at the inquest seemed to me to suggest that they were satisfied that the woman on the balcony must have been alone.”

“Did anyone suggest that she might have simply overbalanced? That it was, in fact, an accident?”

“That was, of course, a supposition. But the evidence of the couple in the boat was against it.”

“It seems far more probable than suicide.”

“I suggest you ask me no more about it till you have read my diary of what came before. Then if there's anything more I can tell you, I will.”

“All right, Helena. I daresay you're tired of the whole thing.”

“Not a bit. I'm most interested. A great deal has happened to me in a reasonably varied life, but nothing like this. Give me another drink.”

It was not until he was in bed that Carolus opened the
bulky notebook which Helena Gort had used for her diary. Had she bought it specially? he wondered. How soon had she realized that there was any reason to keep a diary? Wonderful woman—he was sure she would have noted the very things he wanted to know.

He arranged a pile of pillows, set the light so that it fell on Helena's fine angular handwriting, and began.

I A
RRIVED
here at four o'clock this afternoon and I am already mystified. What was intended to be a quiet month in a seaside guest house among commonplace middle-aged people looks like turning into something very different and perhaps not altogether pleasant. I will try to explain what makes me think this.

First, lest you should suppose these are the imaginings of a nervous old lady, let me explain about myself. I am, perhaps, old, being sixty-two, and I haven't the least objection to being called a lady, but I am not at all nervous. My name is scarcely remembered now, for the eight books I have written have not had any popular success though my
Travels in French Equatorial Africa
had a certain
succès d'estime
before the war. I am in the best of health and always full of energy. I am considered a down-to-earth sort of person and have, I hope, a sense of humour. I have no near relatives or responsibilities and my income is sufficient but not lavish.

I came to this place because some acquaintances of mine were here last year and found it comfortable. The house is called Cat's Cradle and it is a long, flat, plain-looking
house built on a rocky headland so that the rooms on the south side look across the bay, while those on the narrow eastern end of the house look straight out to sea, with a cliff below them. It is not a huge or forbidding cliff, but one can look down from the stone balconies, perhaps fifty feet, to the rocks below or, at high tide, to the water which scarcely covers them. The house is supposed to have been built by an eccentric millionaire, but I have noticed that in England anyone who creates a home which is not exactly like everyone else's is an eccentric millionaire. There is nothing eccentric about Cat's Cradle; it is solidly built of stone on rock foundations and although the architecture might be described as Victorian rococo, the site is magnificent.

I came here to work. To my surprise, a travel book of mine which I thought almost forgotten is to be re-issued in a paperback edition and I want to revise it thoroughly before it goes to press. I wrote to Mrs Derosse, the proprietress, and received a very pleasant and sensible letter giving me her terms, which are not excessive. It seems she prefers permanent lettings and runs the place chiefly for people who for one reason or another do not want to keep up homes of their own. She had a vacancy for the last half of August and the whole of September and I took it.

She warned me that the nearest town is Belstock, three miles away, and that there is nothing between Cat's Cradle and that except a holiday camp. “But that doesn't trouble us,” she added, “as the inmates have their own amusements within the camp and rarely leave it.” It all sounded ideal and I looked forward to days of quiet work in my room, with perhaps some good Bridge in the evening.

My first surprise was Mrs Derosse herself. I had pictured her a neat, businesslike, busy woman. She is enormous,
loud, good-natured and—this will sound absurd till I explain more fully—frightened. I knew it before I had been with her five minutes. She is by nature a self-assured type, yet, while we were talking, she had that curious absent air which you find in people who are afraid of what may happen next. She seemed to be listening for something, though not anything specific.

Moreover, she has a past. It is not a very shameful one and she told it me quite readily when I gave her an opportunity. She was in the circus. I happened to mention that her name reminded me of a famous circus star I remembered seeing in Milan many years ago, who was billed as Leon de Rossi.

“That was my husband,” she said. “And if you saw him you must have seen me because I was in the act.”

I did seem to remember a dark buxom girl and I pretended to recognize her at once. She was delighted and for a moment lost that air of apprehension. It was then she said that her guests knew she had been in the circus and she sometimes wondered what they thought.

“It's not that it's anything to be ashamed of,” she said. “Quite the contrary. My niece is still in the business and was at Olympia last year. It's just that the clientele here are well … rather stuffy sort of people, if you know what I mean. Mostly retired, quiet, elderly. They may not like it. And anyhow, just lately …”

She stopped and I said: “Yes?”

“Nothing, really. There's been rather a change since your friends were here last year.”

“In what way?”

“It's hard to explain. I think it's since Mrs Mallister died. However, you don't want to hear about that.”

Of course my curiosity was aroused and I
did
want to hear about that, but I thought it better not to ask direct questions.

“I didn't know you'd had a death in the house,” I said.

“Yes, yes. Two months ago,” she answered rather impatiently. “Mrs Mallister.” She said no more.

I went with her to see my room, which is delightful. I have a sea view, but not the sheer one from the rooms on the east end.

At tea, which was in the room called the lounge, I met several of my fellow guests. There were a Major Natterley and his wife, a retired colonial bishop with his sister, and two women, Miss Godwin and Miss Grey, who it seems are not related but have lived together for thirty years and are, inevitably I suppose, called by Mrs Derosse The Gee-Gees. There was also Mr Mallister, the widower of the lady whose death seems to have marked the ‘change' in life at Cat's Cradle. More guests were promised at dinner time, but I felt these were quite enough to go on with.

We chatted with the most idiotic cliches. Had I had a nice journey? Wasn't the weather wonderful so late in August? Miss Godwin or Miss Grey—I haven't yet learned to distinguish them—had read one of my books and said I must have had a most
interesting
life, and so on. Here, too, I was conscious of something behind the conversation, as it were, as though everyone thought there were eavesdroppers.

Yet there was nothing extraordinary about the people in themselves. The only mystery about Bishop Grissell is why he should have retired, for he seems to be in the prime of life. A tall, sinewy man with a deep voice, he has fierce little tufts of hair and powerful, tanned features. He is bald, but over his ears and eyes, from his lobes and nostrils, on his wrists and neck, black hair sprouts and he looks muscular and stringy. His sister whom he calls ‘Phiz, my dear'—or is it' Fizz, my dear'?—is tall, too. She has shared his travels and looks as though she has been
carried in a sedan chair in tropical climates: a downright, rather aggressive woman who gave me piercing stares and, when my book was mentioned, said: “I never read books by women.”

I said: “Oh, why not?” as though I was deeply interested and she replied simply: “Waste of time.”

The Natterleys speak only in terms of ‘wea habit which, carried to extremes by married couples, seems to me rather tiresome. They are much concerned with explaining their dislikes and disapprovals. ‘We don't care for that sort of thing.' ‘We shouldn't wish to do that.' They must find life difficult. “We never eat cucumber in any form,” one of them said when they were handed the sandwiches. “We don't believe in eating between meals,” explained the other. He is small and dressy while she has been very pretty, I think, and would be still, if the corners of her mouth did not go down in perpetual disapproval.

As for the Gee-Gees, one is timid and rather sweet, the other of sterner stuff but not in the least pushing. They were schoolmistresses until one of them—I shall know which in time—inherited rather a lot of money and they gave up teaching to travel. They moved about for many years, seeing all the places they had talked about in geography lessons, and have been at Cat's Cradle longer than anyone else.

The widower has remained here. He is a small, modest, smiling man in his forties with a kind face and quiet voice, a favourite with Mrs Derosse, I gather. He has good manners and was apt to be somewhat attentive to me. Not quite ingratiating—what is called ‘nice'.

If the undertone of disturbance or apprehension, or whatever it is, does not only exist in my imagination, if it is anything more than a hunch of mine, I mean, then my first impression is that it is not directly connected with any of these. They are rather the kind of people one
would expect to find in a fairly expensive guest house in a healthy situation, and, when I left them after tea, I found myself looking forward with some interest to meeting what Bishop Grissell calls ‘the younger faction'. This I did before dinner.

None of the men actually get into dinner-jackets for this, but there is a good deal of rather self-conscious ‘changing', and first and second gongs are sounded. How Mrs Derosse gets staff I can't think—bribery, I suppose—but the ‘backbone ‘of it, she told me, is a married couple who have been with her some years and ‘really,' she says, ‘they might just as well be my partners. They do better out of it than I do.' But Jerrison, the man who waits at table, seems efficient, and his wife—I judge from this evening's meal—is a good cook.

At seven there is a gathering in the lounge and Jerrison serves drinks, mainly sherry, I noticed; he has a little serving-bar in the entrance hall which he opens at this time. I don't know what kind of licence Mrs Derosse has, but imagine these drinks are considered ‘with meals'. I asked for a pink gin and Jerrison gave me a snorter.

While I was drinking this, Sonia Reid came in. She is very nearly beautiful—thirty-two or -three, I should say, a good figure and a vivid sensual face. She is, I decided at once, the
femme fatale
of this little party. She chatted with me amicably, keeping her fine dark eyes on mine as she did so. I felt she was sizing me up, not as a person but as I might affect her. Could I be of any possible interest? Did my arrival constitute a threat to anything she wanted? All this while she talked about the garden, and how impossible it was to make anything grow in these salt sea winds.

But Sonia Reid is not the only woman at Cat's Cradle who might claim to be attractive, as I realized when Esmée Welton appeared—a very different style, but good-
looking all the same. She is small, full of character, intelligent and dresses with flair.

Both Sonia Reid and Esmée Welton work. Esmée is the manageress of a big dress shop in Belstock—quite an important affair. Sonia is in partnership with a man, owning what was once a small music shop but is now a much larger business dealing in television and radio as well as gramophone records and musical instruments. She is supposed to be a fine pianist.