Chapter and Hearse Page 16
‘I understand,’ said Tom Witherington, ‘that they only just got out too. Skin of their teeth and all that.’
‘As the poet so wisely said,’ murmured Henry, ‘“The only certain freedom’s in departure.”’
‘If you ask me,’ said old Uncle George, a veteran of the Boer War, ‘they did well to go while the going was good.’
‘It’s the sort of thing you can leave too late,’ pronounced Dr Friar weightily. Leaving things too late was every doctor’s nightmare.
‘I don’t envy ’em being where they are now,’ said Tom. ‘That camp they’re in is pretty bleak, especially in the winter.’
This was immediately confirmed by Mrs Godiesky the moment she entered the room. She regarded the Witheringtons’ glowing fire with deep appreciation. ‘We ’ave been so cooald, so cooaald,’ she said as she stared hungrily at the logs stacked by the open fireside. ‘So very cooald…’
Her husband’s English was slightly better, although also heavily accented. ‘If we had not left when we did –’ he opened his hands expressively – ‘then who knows what would have become of us?’
‘Who, indeed?’ echoed Henry, who actually had a very much better idea than anyone else present of what might have become of the Godieskys had they not left their native heath when they did. Reports reaching the Foreign Office were very, very discouraging.
‘They closed my university department down overnight,’ explained Professor Hans Godiesky. ‘Without any warning at all.’
‘It was very terrrrrible,’ said Mrs Godiesky, holding her hands out to the fire as if she could never be warm again.
‘What sort of a department was it, sir?’ enquired Henry casually of the professor.
‘Chemistry,’ said the refugee, just as the two Watkins came in and the hanging mistletoe was put to good use. They were followed fairly quickly by Robert and Lorraine Steele from next door. The introductions in their case were more formal. Robert Steele was a good bit older than his wife, who was dressed in a very becoming mixture of red and dark green, though with a skirt that was rather shorter than either Wendy’s or Dora’s and even more noticeably so than that of Marjorie Friar, who was clearly no dresser.
‘We’re so glad you could get away in time,’ exclaimed Wendy, while Tom busied himself with furnishing everyone with sherry. ‘It must be difficult if there’s late dispensing to be done.’
‘No trouble these days,’ boomed Robert Steele. ‘I’ve got a young assistant now. He’s a great help.’
Then Miss Hooper, whose skirt was longest of all, was shown in. She was out of breath and full of apology for being late. ‘Wendy, dear, I am so very sorry,’ she fluttered. ‘I’m afraid, the waits will be here in no time at all…’
‘And they won’t wait,’ said Henry guilelessly, ‘will they?’
‘If you ask me,’ opined Tom Witherington, ‘they won’t get past the Royal Oak in a hurry.’
‘The children are coming down in their dressing gowns to listen to the carols,’ said Wendy, rightly ignoring both remarks. ‘And I don’t mind how tired they get tonight.’
‘Who’s playing Father Christmas?’ asked Robert Steele jovially. He was a plump fellow, whose gaze rested fondly on his young wife most of the time.
‘Not me,’ said Tom Witherington.
‘I am,’ declared Henry. ‘For my sins.’
‘Then when I am tackled on the matter,’ said the children’s father piously, ‘I can put my hand on my heart and swear total innocence.’
‘And how will you get out of giving an honest answer, Henry?’ enquired Dora Watkins playfully.
‘I shall hope,’ replied Henry, ‘to remain true to the traditions of the Foreign Service and give an answer that is at one and the same time absolutely correct and totally meaningless…’
At which moment the sound of the dinner gong being struck came from the hall and presently the whole party moved through to the dining room, Uncle George giving the barometer a surreptitious tap on the way.
* * *
Henry Tyler studied the members of the party under cover of a certain amount of merry chat. It was part and parcel of his training that he could at one and the same time discuss Christmas festivities in England with poor Mrs Godiesky while covertly observing the other guests. Lorraine Steele was clearly the apple of her husband’s eye but he wasn’t sure that the same could be said for Marjorie Friar, who emerged as a complainer and sounded – and looked – quite aggrieved with life.
Lorraine Steele, though, was anything but dowdy. Henry decided her choice of red and green – Christmas colours – was a sign of a new outfit for Yuletide.
He was also listening for useful clues about their homeland in the Professor’s conversation, while becoming aware that Tom’s old Uncle George really was getting quite senile now and learning that the latest of Mrs Friar’s succession of housemaids had given in her notice.
‘And at Christmas too,’ she complained. ‘So inconsiderate.’
Peter Watkins was displaying a modest pride in his Christmas present to his wife.
‘Well,’ he said in the measured tones of his profession of banking, ‘personally, I’m sure that refrigerators are going to be the thing of the future.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with a good old-fashioned larder,’ said Wendy stoutly, like the good wife she was. There was little chance of Tom Witherington being able to afford a luxury like a refrigerator for a very long time. ‘Besides, I don’t think Cook would want to change her ways now. She’s quite set in them, you know.’
‘But think of the food we’ll save,’ said Dora. ‘It’ll never go bad now.’
‘“Use it up, wear it out.”’ Something had stirred in old Uncle George’s memory. ‘“Make it do, do without or we’ll send it to Belgium.”’
‘And you’ll be more likely to avoid food poisoning too,’ said Robert Steele earnestly. ‘Won’t they, Dr Friar?’
‘Yes, indeed,’ the medical man agreed at once. ‘There’s always too much of that about and it can be very dangerous.’
The pharmacist looked at both the Watkins and said gallantly, ‘I can’t think of a better present.’
‘But you did, darling,’ chipped in Lorraine Steele brightly, ‘didn’t you?’
Henry was aware of an unspoken communication passing between the two Steeles; and then Lorraine Steele allowed her left hand casually to appear above the table. Her fourth finger was adorned with both a broad gold wedding ring and a ring on which was set a beautiful solitaire diamond.
‘Robert’s present,’ she said rather complacently, patting her blonde Marcel-waved hair and twisting the diamond ring round. ‘Isn’t it lovely?’
‘I wanted her to wear it on her right hand,’ put in Robert Steele, ‘because she’s left-handed, but she won’t hear of it.’
‘I should think not,’ said Dora Watkins at once. ‘The gold wedding ring sets it off so nicely.’
‘That’s what I say too,’ said Mrs Steele prettily, lowering her beringed hand out of sight again.
‘Listen!’ cried Wendy suddenly. ‘It’s the waits. I can hear them now. Come along, everyone. It’s mince pies and coffee all round in the hall afterwards.’
The Berebury carol singers parked their lanterns outside the front door and crowded round the Christmas tree in the Witheringtons’ entrance hall, their sheets of music held at the ready.
‘Right,’ called out their leader, a young man with a rather prominent Adam’s apple. He began waving a little baton. ‘All together now…’
The familiar words of ‘Once in Royal David’s City’ soon rang out through the house, filling it with joyous sound. Henry caught a glimpse of a tear in Mrs Godiesky’s eye and noted a look of great nostalgia in little Miss Hooper’s earnest expression. There must have been ghosts of Christmases past in the scene for her too.
Afterwards, when it became important to re-create the scene in his mind for the police, Henry could place only the Steeles at the back of the entrance hall, with D
r Friar and Uncle George beside them. Peter and Dora Watkins had opted to stand a few steps up the stairs to the first-floor landing, slightly out of the press of people but giving them a good view. Mrs Friar was standing awkwardly in front of the leader of the choir. Of Professor Hans Godiesky there was no sign whatsoever while the carols were being sung.
Henry remembered noticing suppressed excitement in the faces of his niece and nephew perched at the top of the stairs and hoping it was the music that they had found entrancing and not the piles of mince pies awaiting them among the decorative smilax on the credenza at the back of the hall.
They – and everyone else – fell upon them nonetheless as soon as the last carol had been sung. There was a hot punch too, carefully mulled to just the right temperature by Tom Witherington for those old enough to partake of it, and homemade lemonade for the young.
Almost before the last choirboy had scoffed the last mince pie, the party at the Witheringtons’ broke up.
The pharmacist and his wife were the first to leave. They shook hands all round.
‘I know it’s early,’ said Lorraine Steele apologetically, ‘but I’m afraid Robert’s poor old tummy’s playing him up again.’
Henry, who had been expecting a rather limp paw, was surprised to find how firm her handshake was.
‘If you’ll forgive us,’ said Lorraine’s husband to Wendy, ‘I think we’d better be on our way now.’
Robert Steele essayed a glassy, strained smile, but to Henry’s eye he looked more than a little white at the gills. Perhaps he too had spotted that the ring that was his Christmas present to his wife had got a nasty stain on the inner side of it.
The pair hurried off together in a flurry of farewells. Then the wispy Miss Hooper declared the evening a great success but said she wanted to check everything at St Faith’s before the midnight service and she too slipped away.
‘What I want to know,’ said Dora Watkins provocatively when the rest of the guests had reassembled in the drawing room and Edward and Jennifer had been sent back – very unwillingly – to bed, ‘is whether it’s better to be an old man’s darling or a young man’s slave?’
A frown crossed Wendy’s face. ‘I’m not sure,’ she said seriously.
‘I reckon our Mrs Steele’s got her husband where she wants him, all right,’ said Peter Watkins, ‘don’t you?’
‘Come back, William Wilberforce, there’s more work on slavery still to be done,’ said Tom Witherington lightly. ‘What about a nightcap, anyone?’
But there were no takers and in a few moments the Friars too had left.
Wendy suddenly said she had decided against going to the midnight service after all and would see everyone in the morning. The rest of the household also opted for an early night and in the event Henry Tyler was the only one of the party to attend the midnight service at St Faith’s Church that night.
* * *
The words of the last carol, ‘We Three Kings of Orient are…’, were still ringing in his ears as he crossed the market square to the church. Henry wished that the Foreign Office had only kings to deal with: life would be simpler then. Dictators – and Presidents, particularly one President not so very many miles from ‘perfidious Albion’ – were much more unpredictable.
He sang the words of the last verse of the carol as he climbed the church steps:
‘Myrrh is mine; it’s bitter perfume
Breathes a life of gathering gloom;
Sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying,
Sealed in the stone-cold tomb.’
Perhaps, he thought, as he sought a back pew and his nostrils caught the inimical odour of a mixture of burning candles and church flowers, he should have been thinking of frankincense or even – when he saw the burnished candlesticks and altar cross – Melchior’s gold …
His private orisons were interrupted a few minutes later by a sudden flurry of activity near the front of the church and he looked up in time to see little Miss Hooper being helped out by the two churchwardens.
‘If I might just have a drink of water,’ he heard her say before she was borne off to the vestry. ‘I’ll be all right in a minute. So sorry to make a fuss. So very sorry…’
* * *
The Rector’s sermon was its usual interminable length and he was able to wish his congregation a happy Christmas as they left the church. As Henry walked back across the square he met Dr Friar coming out of the Steeles’ house.
‘Chap’s collapsed,’ he murmured. ‘Severe epigastric pain and vomiting. Mrs Steele came round to ask me if I would go and see him. There was blood in the vomit and that frightened her.’
‘It would,’ said Henry.
‘He’s pretty ill,’ said the doctor. ‘I’m getting him into hospital as soon as possible.’
‘Could it have been something he ate here?’ said Henry, telling him about little Miss Hooper.
‘Too soon to tell, but quite possible,’ said the doctor gruffly. ‘You’d better check how the others are when you get in. I rather think Wendy might be ill too, from the look of her when we left, and I must say my wife wasn’t feeling too grand when I went out. Ring me if you need me.’
Henry came back to a very disturbed house indeed, with several bedroom lights on. No one was very ill, but Wendy and Mrs Godiesky were distinctly unwell. Dora Watkins was perfectly all right and was busy ministering to those who weren’t.
Happily, there was no sound from the children’s room and he crept in there to place a full stocking beside each of their beds. As he came back downstairs to the hall, he thought he heard an ambulance bell next door.
‘The position will be clearer in the morning,’ he said to himself, a Foreign Office man to the end of his fingertips.
* * *
It was.
Half the Witherington household had had a severe gastrointestinal upset during the night and Robert Steele had died in the Berebury Royal Infirmary at about two o’clock in the morning.
When Henry met his sister on Christmas morning she had a very wan face indeed.
‘Oh, Henry,’ she cried, ‘isn’t it terrible about Robert Steele? And the rector says half the young waits were ill in the night too, and poor little Miss Hooper as well!’
‘That lets the punch out, doesn’t it,’ said Henry thoughtfully, ‘seeing as the youngsters weren’t supposed to have any.’
‘Cook says—’
‘Is she all right?’ enquired Henry curiously.
‘She hasn’t been ill, if that’s what you mean, but she’s very upset.’ Wendy sounded quite nervous. ‘Cook says nothing like this has ever happened to her before.’
‘It hasn’t happened to her now,’ pointed out Henry unkindly, but Wendy wasn’t listening.
‘And Edward and Jennifer are all right, thank goodness,’ said Wendy a little tearfully. ‘Tom’s beginning to feel better but I hear Mrs Friar’s pretty ill still and poor Mrs Godiesky is feeling terrible. And as for Robert Steele … I just don’t know what to think. Oh, Henry, I feel it’s all my fault.’
‘Well, it wasn’t the lemonade,’ deduced Henry. ‘Both children had lots. I saw them drinking it.’
‘They had a mince pie each too,’ said their mother. ‘I noticed. But some people who had them have been very ill since…’
‘Exactly, my dear. Some, but not all.’
‘But what could it have been, then?’ quavered Wendy. ‘Cook is quite sure she used only the best of everything. And it stands to reason it was something that they ate here.’ She struggled to put her fears into words. ‘Here was the only place they all were.’
‘It stands to reason that it was something they were given here,’ agreed Henry, whom more than one ambassador had accused of pedantry, ‘which is not quite the same thing.’
She stared at him. ‘Henry, what do you mean?’
* * *
Inspector Milsom knew what he meant.
It was the evening of Boxing Day when he and Constable Bewman came to the Witheringtons’ house.
Mrs Godiesky shuddered. ‘Me, I suffer a lot.’
‘Me too,’ Peter Watkins chimed in.
‘But not, I think, sir, your wife?’ Inspector Milsom looked interrogatively at Dora Watkins.
‘No, Inspector,’ said Dora. ‘I was quite all right.’
‘Just as well,’ said Tom Witherington. He still looked pale. ‘We needed her to look after us.’
‘Quite so,’ said the Inspector.
‘It wasn’t food poisoning, then?’ said Wendy eagerly. ‘Cook will be very pleased…’
‘It would be more accurate, madam,’ said Inspector Milsom, who didn’t have a cook to be in awe of, ‘to say that there was poison in the food.’
Wendy paled. ‘Oh…’
‘This dangerous substance of which you speak,’ enquired Professor Godiesky with interest, ‘is its nature known?’
‘In England,’ said the Inspector, ‘we call it corrosive sublimate…’
‘Mercury? Ah…’ The refugee nodded sagely. ‘That would explain everything.’
‘Not quite everything, sir,’ said the Inspector mildly. ‘Now, if we might see you one at a time, please.’
‘This poison, Inspector,’ said Henry after he had given his account of the carol-singing to the two policemen, ‘I take it that it is not easily available?’
‘That is correct, sir. But specific groups of people can obtain it.’
‘Doctors and pharmacists?’ hazarded Henry.
‘And certain manufacturers…’
‘Certain … Oh, Uncle George?’ said Henry. ‘Of course. There’s plenty of mercury in thermometers.’
‘The old gentleman is definitely a little confused, sir.’
‘And professors of chemistry?’ said Henry.
‘In his position,’ said the Inspector judiciously, ‘I should myself have considered having something with me just in case.’
‘There being a fate worse than death,’ agreed Henry swiftly, ‘such as life in some places in Europe today. Inspector, might I ask what form this poison takes?’