Police at the Funeral (15 page)

‘Too bad,' he sympathized. ‘That's the worst of the police. You can't keep 'em out of the kitchen. It comes of keeping comic papers in the waiting-room at the Yard, I've no doubt.'

The light in the upper hall was subdued. The plan of the rooms on the first floor was much the same as below. Thus, Great-aunt Caroline's bedroom was directly above the drawing-room, with Joyce's room beside it over the morning-room. There was a bathroom directly above the Queen Anne sitting-room, and Kitty and Julia had rooms side by side over the library. In the other branch of the L, William's room, Andrew's room and the spare room, which had been allotted to Campion, ran side by side over the dining-room and kitchen, with the service staircase beyond. All these rooms gave on to a corridor whose windows overlooked the drive. The servants' rooms and attics were on the second floor.

As they reached the upper hall the girl laid her hand on Campion's arm.

‘Wait a minute,' she said. ‘I'll get you the hairpin. Aunt Kitty won't mind me borrowing one of hers.'

Left alone in the softly lighted, thick carpeted hall, with its dark paint and carved oak furniture, Campion, who was by no means a nervous man, was seized by a sudden revulsion of feeling which he could not explain. It was not so much a terror of the unknown as a sense of oppression brooding over the
house, a suffocated feeling as if he were set down inside a huge tea-cosy with something unclean.

It was evident that the girl experienced much the same feeling, for she was very pale and inclined to be jumpy when she came out to him a moment later, a coarse black hairpin in her hand.

‘Where first?' she whispered.

‘Andrew's room,' murmured Campion. ‘Are you coming with me?'

She hesitated. ‘Shall I be any use? I don't want to be in the way.'

‘You won't be in the way, if you don't mind coming.'

‘All right.'

They moved silently down the corridor and the girl paused before the centre door of the three which led off it.

‘Here we are,' she said. ‘That's your room on the left and Uncle William's on the right. This is Andrew's.'

Mr Campion took the hairpin and squatted down before the keyhole.

‘This parlour trick of mine must not be taken as representative,' he said. ‘Some people laugh when they see it and some people kick me out of the house. I don't often do it.'

All the time he was talking his fingers were moving rapidly, and suddenly a sharp click rewarded his labours and he stood up and regarded her shamefacedly.

‘Don't tell Marcus,' he whispered. ‘He's one who wouldn't laugh.'

She smiled at him. ‘I know,' she said. ‘Who's going in first?'

Mr Campion opened the door slowly and they crept in, closing it silently behind them. The girl switched on the light and they stood looking about them. The room had the cold, slightly stale atmosphere of a closed bedroom in an old-fashioned house. At first sight Campion was startled. It was so different from what he had expected. Apart from a wall of bookshelves in the midst of which there was a small writingdesk, the room might have belonged to a modern hermit. It was large and inexpressibly bare, with white walls and no carpet, save for a small jute bath-mat set beside the bed. This was of the truckle variety, and it looked hard and thinly covered.
A simple wooden stand with a small mirror above it served as a dressing-table and supported some half-dozen photographs. The simplicity and poverty of the room compared with the solid comfort of the rest of the house, was startling to the point of theatricality. A cupboard built into the wall was the only sign of clothes room, and a huge iron damper covered the fireplace.

The girl caught a glimpse of Campion's face. ‘I know what you're thinking,' she said. ‘You feel like everyone else. Andrew liked to play at being the poor relation. This room is one of his elaborate insults to the rest of the family. Yet he liked comfort quite as much as anybody, and for years, I believe, this room was one of the most luxurious bedrooms in the house. Then, about a year ago, Andrew took it into his head to have it all changed. The carpet had to be taken up, the walls stripped and this stage setting of a prison arranged. D'you know,' she went on angrily, ‘he used to bring visitors up here to show them how badly he was treated. Of course, the rest of the family was livid, but he was cleverer than they are. He used to make it look as though they were forcing him to live uncomfortably, which, of course, was absolute rubbish. He certainly had a most exasperating way.'

Campion crossed to the bookcase and peered in. The volumes were standing on shelves on which leather dust frills had been nailed. The titles surprised him. It was quite a large library and appeared to be devoted to the best-known works of a certain character. Uncle Andrew's taste in literature appeared to have leant towards classical eroticism, although the more modern psychologists were also well represented. Mr Campion, picking up an early treatise on
Sex and the Mind,
found that it had been the property of a medical library in Edinburgh, purloined, apparently about thirty years before. He replaced the book on the shelf and turned back into the room.

As he did so he caught sight of one of the few
objets d'art
it contained. This was a relief of the
Laocoön,
evidently an ancient rendering of the famous group in the Vatican. But the carver had put something of his own into the work: in place of the noble unreality of the original, there was an imaginative study in horror which, in spite of its small size, seemed to dominate the apartment. Joyce shuddered.

‘I hate that thing,' she said. ‘Aunt Kitty used to say it made her dream, and Andrew wanted to make her hang it in her room – until she got used to it, he said. He told her a long rigmarole about conquering fear by willpower, and almost persuaded her to take the thing. Probably he would have done so if Julia hadn't sailed in to the rescue and put her foot down. That was the kind of thing she liked doing. Oh, they're all so petty! Aunt Caroline's strict, but she's strict in a big way.'

Meanwhile Mr Campion continued to wander round the room. He peered into the clothes cupboard, opened the desk, and finally came to a full stop before the dressing-table. An exclamation escaped him, and he picked up a photograph of a clerical personage, a white-haired and benevolent figure. It was inscribed: ‘
To my old friend Andrew Seeley, in memory of our holiday in Prague. Wilfred
.'

Joyce looked over Campion's shoulder. ‘He's a bishop,' she said. ‘Andrew was secretly very proud of knowing him so well, I think. He used to hint that they had the wildest holiday together. Why are you staring at it? Do you know him?'

‘I did,' said Mr Campion. ‘He's dead, poor old boy. That's my sainted uncle, the Bishop of Devizes. He wasn't the sort of old bird to go gay on a holiday in Prague, although he knew more about dry-fly fishing than any man alive, I believe. But that isn't the really extraordinary thing about this photograph. The odd thing is that this isn't his handwriting. It isn't quite his signature. In fact, it's a fake.'

The girl stared at him round-eyed. ‘But Andrew said—' she began, and stopped short, a contemptuous expression spreading over her face. ‘That's just like Andrew.'

Mr Campion set the photograph down. ‘I don't think there's much more to be seen here,' he said, ‘and we haven't any too much time. Let's go on, shall we?'

She nodded and they tiptoed out. The relocking ceremony took some minutes, but Julia's door yielded almost immediately.

Seen directly after the late Uncle Andrew's den, Miss Julia Faraday's bedroom was an overbearingly cluttered apartment. It was crammed full of furniture of every possible description, and achieved fussiness without femininity. The two large windows had three sets of curtains each; Nottingham lace gave
way to frilled muslin and frilled muslin to yellow damask looped up with great knots of silk cable which looked as though it would have held a liner. The keynote of the whole scheme of decoration was drapery.

The fireplace was surrounded with loops of the same yellow damask, and the bed, the focusing point, the rococo
pièce de résistance
of the whole room, was befrilled and befurbelowed until its original shape was lost altogether.

The bed interested Mr Campion from the beginning, and he stood looking at it with respectful astonishment.

‘They call that an Italian brass bed, for some reason or other,' Joyce volunteered. ‘I think it's because of those wing bits with the curtains on. You see, they move backwards and forwards and keep the draught out. Not that there ever is a draught in this house.'

The young man advanced towards the monstrosity and stood with a hand resting on one of the huge brass knobs which surmounted each post. For some moments he stood staring in front of him at the tapestry-hung brass railings beyond the expanse of eiderdown, and he turned and surveyed the rest of the room.

It was evident to a practised eye that a very thorough search had been made already. Glancing at the pantechnicon of a wardrobe with its quadruple doors, he realized that the police must have leapt upon this as a possible source of discovery, and he knew better than anyone that to search after a Yard man is so much waste of time. Yet somewhere in this room there was, he felt sure, some trace of the poison which had killed Aunt Julia. Joyce broke in upon his meditations.

‘You never knew her, did you?' she said. ‘All these are photographs of her.' She pointed to an array of ornamental frames above the mantelshelf. They were all of them portraits of the same woman in various stages of maturity, beginning with a heavy-featured girl laced uncomfortably into unbecoming garments and progressing gradually into corpulent middle age. The final portrait showed a grey-haired, stern-faced woman, whose lines of bad temper from her nose to her mouth were so deep that even the photographer had been unable to conceal them.

‘She'd got much thinner lately,' said Joyce. ‘And I think her temper had got worse, too. She may have been ill. Perhaps – perhaps it was suicide after all.'

‘Perhaps,' agreed Mr Campion. ‘That's what we've got to find out before we go outside this room. In fact, at this point a little elementary brain-work is indicated. After all, deduction is only adding two and two together. Look here, how does this sound to you? Aunt Julia was not the sort of person to take her own life. As far as we know she was poisoned by conium, which is one of the oldest, simplest forms known to man, and is simply another name for hemlock. It is also practically tasteless in tea.' He paused and regarded the girl steadily. ‘Now Aunt Julia seems to have been in the habit of putting something in her tea every morning,' he said. ‘We know that, because Alice had noticed a sediment in the bottom of her cup every day for the last six months. Therefore it's quite reasonable to suppose that Aunt Julia put the poison which killed her into her tea this morning under the impression that it was her usual dose of something or other. Now, what we have to find out sooner or later is whether she made a mistake off her own bat or whether someone intended her to make a mistake.'

Joyce nodded. ‘I see,' she said.

‘Personally,' said Mr Campion, taking off his glasses, ‘I don't see how it could have been a genuine mistake if the poison was conium. It's simple enough to get hold of, but it's got to be prepared. However, the first step is to find out what it was that Aunt Julia put in her tea every morning. Some sort of patent medicine, obviously. That's Inspector Oates's idea, I believe. But what it was and where it is is still a mystery. You see, there's no trace of it. Neither Aunt Kitty nor Alice had ever heard of her taking anything regularly. Had you?'

Joyce shook her head. ‘No. As a matter of fact, great-aunt does the dispensing for the whole family. There's a medicine chest in her room, and the only other thing is a first-aid box in the upper hall. What sort of patent medicine were you thinking of?'

Campion considered. ‘Well, some sort of health salts, I suppose. You know – “Take as much as you dare and leap over the next gate grinning dangerously” –
vide
press. The only thing
against that theory is that there aren't any health salts about, no empty tins or packets or anything. The Inspector has been over this room, and that means that there is no place large enough to contain a tin, say as large as a fifty Gold Flake, that has not been explored. They'll probably start on the rest of the house tomorrow if we don't spot it tonight.'

The girl looked round helplessly. ‘It seems such a hopeless job,' she said. ‘We don't even know what we're looking for.' She eyed Campion curiously. Without his spectacles his appearance had gained at least fifty per cent in intelligence.

He met her gaze. ‘You don't think,' he said slowly, ‘that Alice could have brought anything into the room, do you? After all, she was the only other person about on this floor at that time of the morning.'

Joyce shook her head vigorously. ‘Oh, no. She's such a good soul. She's the last person in the world to do anything like that. She's been here thirty years.'

‘Alice knows something,' said Mr Campion. ‘She just reeks of a secret. But I don't suppose it's anything to do with this.'

‘It isn't.' The girl spoke involuntarily and then flushed scarlet, realizing that she had betrayed herself.

Just for a moment Mr Campion's pale eyes rested upon her face. Then he returned to his deductions.

‘This patent medicine we're looking for,' he said. ‘Since no one has ever seen it, it must have been hidden by Aunt Julia herself. That gives us a line. Let us put ourselves in her place. Suppose I am a heavy, lazy woman lying in bed. A cup of hot tea is brought to me. I wish to take something from its hiding-place, put it in my tea and return the packet to concealment in the shortest possible space of time and with the maximum of comfort. That leads us directly to the bed.'