Madam, Will You Talk? by Mary Stewart
He said, remorsefully: ‘I thought you must be in with them. You see, I didn’t believe for a moment that David himself didn’t want to see me. I thought she – they – must be keeping him under some sort of duress so that he couldn’t write. I thought you were part of it, and I wanted to kill you.’ He smiled. ‘Poor little Charity, did I scare hell out of you?’
‘You did. Is that why you told me you’d done the murder?’
‘Of course. I didn’t know how much they’d told you of the truth, and I wanted to frighten you. And I did. I made you faint. I want whipping for that.’
‘It’s done with,’ I said. ‘I was really scared because I thought you were—’ I stopped abruptly.
‘You thought I was what?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Come on. All the facts. You promised.’
‘I thought you were mad,’ I said, not looking at him.
He did not speak, but I saw his hand arrested in the middle of drawing a circle on the table.
‘I only knew what Mrs. Palmer had told me,’ I said quickly. ‘And then when you – you were so violent, and David was so frightened, I thought you must be mad. I thought you’d have to be mad to have hit David that night … After I’d met you in Nîmes,’ I finished miserably, ‘I thought you’d done it, you see.’
There was a little pause.
‘Charity.’
‘Oh, Richard—’
‘Charity, tell me something.’
‘What?’ I asked. Here it comes, I thought, here it comes.
‘Did David say anything that led you to believe that I was mad?’
‘I – I don’t know,’ I floundered.
‘You’re lying, Charity. You ought to know by now that you can’t lie to me. Did David tell you I was mad?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
When I looked at him at last, he was smiling.
‘You silly little owl,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry so. It makes it reasonably simple.’
‘Simple?’ I echoed stupidly. ‘But I thought you’d—’
‘I mean, its something definite,’ he said. ‘Something we can fight. He did say it himself?’
‘Yes.’
‘In so many words?’
‘Yes.’
‘I see. Well, that means simply this: they’ve persuaded him to believe that it was I who bashed him on the head and/or tried to commit suicide with the Rolls. That’s all that could be construed as mad, unless they threw in the actual murder for good measure. And, since I’m morally certain that they couldn’t get him to believe either that I killed Tony or attacked David himself, then it’s probably the attempted suicide.’
‘So?’
‘Well, as I see it, we’re now in a fairly strong position to fight this belief. He trusts you, doesn’t he?’
‘I think so. Yes, I’m sure he does, after the way I helped him at Nîmes – to get away from you.’
‘Don’t look so rueful. You’ll have to go back and talk to him, convince him, somehow, that I’m as sane as you are, and get him to meet me somewhere and talk to me. Then we’ll get this thing straight, and have done with it once and for all.’
‘You mean, take him straight away?’
‘Of course. D’you think I’d let him go back to her? She and her lover – husband, what you like – can go their way, and David and I will go ours …’ His glance met mine. ‘And yours.’
‘It sounds easy when you put it like that,’ I said. ‘But, Richard, if they are determined somehow to kill you – well, will Deepings be any safer now than it was before?’
He put a hand to his head, in a gesture at once indescribably weary and very youthful.
‘It’s the same old answer, Charity,’ he said. ‘I don’t know. My own home … and for some strange reason it’s no longer safe for me or for my son … for some strange reason: that’s the centre of the matter. This whole crazy story – it’s like a tale told by an idiot, held together by some lunatic logic that we can’t follow till we’ve delved back through his mad past and found—’
‘Freud in the woodshed?’
He grinned a little at that, and finished his drink at a gulp. ‘If you put it that way, yes.’
By now the café was almost empty, and the steady flow of people on the broad pavement had dwindled perceptibly. A few Negro sailors went by, arm in arm with brightly dressed girls. An Arab boy, slim and golden-brown, who might have sat to Polyclites as Hylas, slipped between the tables, begging. People flung him lumps of sugar, which he caught with quick, greedy, graceful fingers, while his monotonous degraded voice mumbled for more.
‘Sometimes lately I’ve thought I really would go mad,’ said Richard suddenly. ‘The murder and the trial, then the car smash and the weeks in hospital, and the appalling headaches I still get. And David. A sudden and complete disruption of my whole life, and David’s life, out of the blue. And it’s the basic unreason of the business that’s getting me down; certain facts are there, but they can’t be facts; there’s no sane pattern to which they fit. That’s what I meant before, Charity, that’s what made me behave like a devil; I find my values slipping till my brain – how does it go? – suffers then the nature of an insurrection. Nothing makes sense; things have turned upside down.’
‘And nothing is,’ I quoted softly, ‘but what is not.’
He said quickly, half eagerly: ‘Yes, that’s it. That’s what Macbeth’s about, isn’t it? Nothing keeping to the rules any more?’
I said: ‘But you forget. Macbeth broke the rules first and upset the balance. There was a logic in it, after all; and Richard, there still is. There must be an explanation, a reason, for your idiot’s tale, only we just haven’t hunted deep enough in the woodshed.’
He did not speak, but his eyes lifted to mine for a moment, and something in them made me speak urgently.
‘Richard. I know I’m right. Don’t you remember, only an hour ago, on the quay, when you said the same thing – about me – and you said that the rules did hold good, no matter what the evidence to the contrary seemed to be? It’s true, my dear. You’ll find there is a pattern that’ll fit the facts. There always is.’
‘But if it’s an idiot’s tale – if you’re dealing with the borderland of sanity—’
‘You’re not,’ I said flatly. ‘And even if you were … why, in Looking-Glass Land itself they kept to the rules of chess. The rules don’t break themselves, Richard.’
‘In fact—’
‘In fact,’ I repeated, ‘there is no such thing as “basic unreason”.’
His eyes were on me, and they were suddenly very bright. He said, softly: ‘Charity never faileth. Yes, you’re right. You’re right. How very right you are …’ He laughed then, and straightened in his chair. ‘Forgive me, my darling. I’ve been living so long on the edge of nothing that it’s addled my wits. Let’s have some coffee, shall we? What’ll you take with it this time?’
‘The same, please.’
‘Garçon. Deux cafes-cassis. No’ – the vigour was back in his voice as he spoke to me – ‘nothing really matters except David, and that part of it’ll soon be straightened out. Once I’ve seen him … How tired are you, Charity?’
The abrupt turn startled me. ‘Tired? I don’t feel tired now.’
‘Sure?’
‘Quite.’
He smiled his sudden, devastatingly attractive smile. ‘Then, on your quite unwomanly assumption that there’s a logic in everything, we’ll begin again at the beginning, rake over the ashes till we discover what makes them tick, probe every avenue to the bone—’
‘I get you,’ I said. ‘Leave no hole and corner unturned. All right. I’m on.’
18
The mordrynge in the bedde …
(Chaucer)
Half an hour and two coffees later, our minds were almost as mixed as our metaphors had been. We had taken out every fact we knew, aired it, shaken it, and set it in its place, and, while certain things had become clearer, the centre of the mystery remaine
‘The motive,’ said Richard for the twentieth time. ‘Tony murdered, and two attempts to murder me – and no motive.’
‘Murder needs a pretty strong motive,’ I said stoutly. ‘There’s one somewhere, if we knew where to look. What do they say are the recognized motives – gain, passion and fear? It’s not murder for money, or for love, apparently, but the third motive’s the strongest of the lot.’
‘Fear? But who’s so afraid of me that they’ve got to kill me?’
‘Obviously someone is, because they’ve tried. Is that logic, Richard?’
He smiled, though the smile was a little strained. ‘All right. Go on from there. You’re not going to tell me that Loraine’s sufficiently afraid of me to want to murder me?’
‘No. I thought we’d decided she was working for somebody else.’
‘Our old friend X; the man in the car. Yes?’
‘X tries to kill you,’ I said, ‘not for gain, not for jealousy, but because of something you can do to him. You, alive, constitute a threat to him, to his liberty – or livelihood – or life.’
The glint of amusement in his eyes was genuine enough. ‘In fact, we’re arrived at another hoary old friend; there’s something I know that I don’t know I know?’
‘Well, it happens,’ I said stubbornly. ‘Don’t try to muddle me. There’s something else that struck me, too, about your chase after Loraine and David.’
He shot me a quick look. ‘Yes?’
‘It was too easy, Richard. If they had really wanted to hide—’
He gave a little nod, as if of satisfaction. ‘Exactly. That’s one of the things that puzzled me. It was too easy by half. She told me she was going to France, she sent me the letters, clearly post-marked as she knew they must be … she left a trail, in fact, up to a point.’
‘You see what it means?’ I said. ‘She – or X – wanted you over here. You told me she tried to get you to come here after you were married. She still wanted that. That’s why she took David in the first place. You’d never have followed Loraine herself, would you? If she’d written to ask you to meet her again you’d have left it to a lawyer—’
‘I certainly should,’ he remarked grimly.
‘So, to make sure of you, she took David to act as bait, and headed you neatly to the South of France.’
‘Towards X, I suppose? You’re implying, are you, that, having failed to kill me in England, X is getting ready to have another shot over here? Laying a trap?’
‘Granted they brought you over here deliberately,’ I said uneasily, ‘and it looks as if they did, then I don’t see why else they should have done it.’
‘All right, we’ll grant that. They lead me to the South of France, but lose me at Pont St. Esprit, either by accident or design.’
‘Which do you think it was?’
He said slowly: ‘I rather think it was an accident. The wrong trial that I followed to Nîmes was genuine enough; another couple had been seen setting out for Nîmes, a couple that might have been Loraine and David from the description I got. I must have gone tearing off after them before Loraine’s clue, whatever it was, had a chance to reach me.’ He laughed shortly. ‘So there they were, marking time in Avignon, while I lost myself chasing red herrings!’
‘No wonder she began to lose her nerve,’ I said. ‘She sounded really frightened that night at the Rocher des Doms.’
‘And no wonder they were quite pleased to let you take David about,’ returned Richard. ‘With me loose in the vicinity, looking for him, there was quite a chance I’d see him, and pick up the trail again.’
I objected to this. ‘What was to stop you talking to David, putting things straight with him, and just taking him away?’
‘Mr. X,’ said Richard simply.
I looked at him, startled. He nodded. ‘Loraine, who had lost her nerve, was better out of the way in Avignon. But where David went, you may be sure Mr. X went too.’
I drew a long breath. ‘On the Tarascon bus,’ I said.
Richard nodded again, and his eyes gleamed. ‘D’you know, I believe we’re getting somewhere. If we’re right, it must have been a bitter moment for Mr. X when you so neatly scooped David out of my reach again, sweet Charity – and incidentally led me right away from X and all his works! It seems I may owe you quite a lot.’
‘But what could he possibly hope to do in Nîmes?’ I protested.
He shrugged. He sounded almost indifferent. ‘God knows. It’s a wild half-deserted country. Anything could happen. A body could lie in that scrub for months, and the kites would—’
‘Don’t!’
‘Well, there it is. It’s a good part of the world for a quiet murder; and that, no doubt, is why I’m being decoyed here.’ He smiled without mirth. ‘I wonder where the trap was to be sprung orginally? Avignon? It seems unlikely.’
‘Loraine said they were going south in a day or so,’ I said quickly. ‘Nice and Monte Carlo.’
‘Did she indeed? If that was true, it could mean anything … there’s some lovely lonely country down here, with nice dangerous cliffs—’
‘And a nice dangerous city,’ I put in.
He lifted an eyebrow. ‘Marseilles? Well? Why not? X fails twice in law-abiding Surrey, so he—’
‘Gets you on to his own ground,’ said I.
‘You’re jumping at this thing, aren’t you?’ said Richard, amused. ‘So Mr. X lives in Marseilles now?’
‘He may call himself Marsden,’ I said doggedly, ‘and read T. S. Eliot – which, incidentally, I saw him doing upside down – but I’ll bet he’s French, and I’ll bet he’s Loraine’s first husband Jean Something-or-other, and I’ll bet he has some definite reason for wanting you down in this part of the country!’
The amusement in his eyes deepened. ‘So it’s all solved, is it? If only I could remember what I know that I don’t know I know!’
‘Well, try, Richard!’ I said, hopelessly. ‘No, don’t laugh at me. I thought this was serious! Think!’
‘My dear child, certainly? But what about?’
I hesitated. ‘Tony’s murder. Murder’s the only thing serious enough to make X go to such lengths, isn’t it? I mean – if you knew something that would hang him?’
But Richard shook his head. ‘That horse won’t run, Charity dear. There’s nothing there, I’m certain of it. The police went into everything, and I – God knows I’ve had long enough to turn it all over in my mind, every grain, every particle, every atom of fact in my possession. You get a lot of time to think in prison, you know.’
‘Yes, I suppose so. I’m sorry I reminded you.’
‘Don’t worry; it doesn’t matter nearly so much as it did half an hour ago.’ He gave me a brief smile. ‘But we’re forgetting one thing, you know. Tony was murdered too, and also without apparent motive. What if X wants, not me for anything connected with Tony’s murder, but both Tony and me for something we were in together?’
‘The antique trade?’ I said hopelessly. ‘Here we go round the prickly pear.’
He shrugged again, and reached for his cigarette-case. ‘Well, there it is. That’s all the connection Tony and I ever had, except the War.’
‘Had you flown together for long?’
‘Not really. It was fairly near the start of my third tour that I pranged. Tony had been with me since half-way through the second.’
‘That, and your meeting after the War – that was absolutely all?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘No shady dealings in Paris?’
‘Not more than usual.’
‘No witnessing a grisly crime in Montmatre?’
‘No.’
‘But you must have done,’ I insisted. ‘Think again. You and Tony must at least have witnessed a murder.’
He grinned. ‘No.’
‘Not even a very small one?’
‘Not even a—’ He checked suddenly in the act of striking a match, and his voice changed. ‘How very odd!’
‘What
‘It’s nothing; nothing to do with this affair. But, oddly enough, Tony and I did once see murder done.’ He held a match to my cigarette, and smiled at my expression. ‘No, really, it’s nothing to do with this. It was during the War; part of the general frightfulness.’
‘You don’t mean the bombing?’
‘Lord, no. I wasn’t young enough to class that as murder; that was just a job. No, this was cold-blooded murder, rather particularly beastly.’
‘Tell me about it. It might, after all, have something to do—’
‘I very much doubt it. And it’s not a nice story.’
‘Never mind that. Tell me, just the same.’
‘Very well. It was when Tony and I were being taken up to Frankfurt for interrogation after the crash – we were the only two commissioned in the air-crew – and there’d been some bomb-damage on the main line, so we were hitched on to a little goods train that went by another route, up the Lahn valley. We had to stop in a siding to let an express go past. It was a filthy grey winter’s afternoon, with snow everywhere, and a sky like a dirty dish-cover clamped down over it. God, it was cold …’
He was staring at the cigarette between his fingers, talking more to himself than me. I think, indeed, that he had forgotten me completely, and was back in that desolate little siding beside the Lahn.
‘… There was another train waiting, too – a lot of boarded-up trucks, with some chalk-marks scrawled across them. We didn’t tumble to it until we saw a little bunch of S.S. guards standing about, and then we realized what was going on. It was a train-load of Jews going East to the slaughter-houses.’
He drew on his cigarette, and expelled the smoke almost fiercely. ‘For a long time, nothing happened, and then, everything seemed to happen at once. We heard the express whistle a short way off. Then there was a yell, a shot, a whole babel of shouts, and the S.S. guards seemed to be running in all directions. All, that is, but the officer; he never even turned his head. I heard two more shots, and a man screaming. Then the screaming stopped, as if he’d bitten his tongue, and the guards were dragging him out from between the trucks of the other train. I suppose he’d made a break for it, poor little bastard. Just a little chap he was, a little thin scarecrow of a man, bleeding a bit, and scared silly. He was crying when they dragged him up to the officer, and they hit him in the face to stop him.’ He shifted in his chair. ‘It was all so quick – far quicker than I’ve been able to describe it: There were we, hardly grasping what was going on, stuck with our guard behind the carriage-windows, and outside – that, all over as quickly as a curse. There wasn’t a sound but the screech of the express, and the little chap crying. And the officer hadn’t even bothered to turn round.’