The Courtesy of Death (7 page)

I did not like that at all. I could only hope that Undine had told him not to be a fool and that he had remained at the Pavilion Hotel after all. I called them up. Mr Fosworthy had come in late,
paid his bill and left. Was Miss Cynthia Carlis there? Yes, she was. At the mention of her, the male voice from the reception desk at once took on a tone of cordiality, even of enthusiasm. I
guessed that there was still another would-be collector of blue willow pattern.

Telephoning for a taxi, I directed the driver to Notting Hill underground station which was not far from the Pavilion. I kept an eye on the back window and made sure that no car was following. I
also waited in the station and watched out for loiterers. As soon as I was certain that no one was taking any interest in my movements, I limped to the hotel.

The porter was helpful. Mr Fosworthy had left on foot, carrying the small bag which was his only luggage. He had, I gathered, tipped generously, asking the porter to take the greatest care of
Miss Carlis and saying that he would look in after breakfast to see how she was. He had not yet arrived.

This demanded immediate action. The disappearance of Fosworthy was a plain fact, as Aviston-Tresco’s attempt on me was not. The police could be called in and told the little I knew. I wish
to God that I had done so then and there, but I thought it best to find out first what Cynthia Carlis had to say.

I sent up my name with a message that I was an old friend of Barnabas Fosworthy and would much like a word with her in the lounge. She came down almost at once—not in the least bothered
about Fosworthy but evidently eager to gossip with someone who knew him.

To my eyes she looked a lot less fragile and more nor­mal than at the hospital dance, for she was dressed in an expensive and countrified sweater with a rolled neck. One was only conscious
of very transparent, white skin on her forehead and below her ears, and there was little temptation for the middle-aged to speculate on the extent of the network. She was also rather older than I
had thought, though well under thirty.

I introduced myself and made it sound as if I had known her Barnabas from childhood. Then I told her, to see how she would react, that he had called on me the previous night and asked me if I
knew of a respectable chaperone.

‘Oh, isn’t that like him!’ she exclaimed with a laugh which I found artificial. ‘He’s such an absurd darling! Do you know that he actually left for another
hotel?’

I replied that I did not. I had no intention of mention­ing his disappearance until I knew how and where she entered the story. For the moment Petunia Avenue and Mr Smith were no business of
hers. So I merely asked what time she expected him to return.

‘He said he would be here at half past nine precisely,’ she replied. ‘But you know his habit of looking round corners to see what is following him. I expect that is just what
he’s doing and that he has lost himself.’

‘Did you always find him like that?’ I asked.

‘Losing himself? Well, he’s so absent-minded.’

‘I meant the looking round corners.’

‘Yes, except the first time we were out together. I thought it was just one of his peculiarities—things that make him different and rather attractive.’

‘Nothing else?’

She hesitated and admitted:

‘Well, there was a friend of mine whom neither of us much wanted to see.’

Obviously innocent! She knew nothing and was not being used. So I decided to go on playing the part of old and trusted friend and find out what the devil she was up to. I did not for a moment
believe that she was in love with Fosworthy. If she had been, she would have man­aged to convince him that his duty was to stay with her, separate rooms or not, instead of treating his
mannerisms as a joke.

I ordered some drinks while we waited for the lover who was not going to arrive, and let her interrogate me about his character and background. She seemed the sort of woman who is incurious
about the depth of our earthy roots, content to loiter through life in a compli­cated surface daze. Well, if appearance reflects character, I suppose that is about all one could expect from a
water nymph: weakness.

Yet, fluttery and irresponsible though I found her, I could not forget the kindness and self-possession with which she had treated the poor, old, flat-earth mathema­tician. The fact was that
her graceful body looked so sensitive and her manners were so automatically good that they covered up her lack of intelligence. In a way she represented, like Fosworthy, a continuance of the best
provincial society of the turn of the century.

I wonder how far she realised that Fosworthy’s own manners concealed an insanity of love. She may have seen their relationship as sweetly sentimental—like that, say, between some
college student and her much older tutor. She possibly went so far as to speculate about a gentle, physical affair, but had no intention of having one.

‘I like Barnabas very much and I am so sorry for him,’ she said.

‘How did you first come across him?’

‘At a meeting of the Arimathaeans in Bath.’

She told me about it. Fosworthy had insisted on holding the floor. It seemed to be his habit to appear as a minority of one. He was deferred to. I doubt if I ever appreciated his importance as a
local oracle. It accounted for the fury of his disciples when he denied his own teachings.

This society, however, had nothing to do with his sect; it was semi-literary with a dash of archaeology, harmlessly and romantically occupying itself with the real and mythical history of Bath
and the Mendips: Arthur and Avalon, of course, the supernatural discovery of the plans of Glastonbury Abbey and so forth.

Fosworthy had been disrespectful about the Christmas-flowering thorn supposedly sprung from the staff of Joseph of Arimathaea. He suggested that this variety had been among the first shrubs to
colonise the tundra after the retreat of the ice, and still required cold to flower. He became excited and eloquent on the marvel of this thorn to palaeolithic man and emphasised the vast antiquity
of folk memory.

Undine’s account was naturally incoherent; but that she could repeat the subject matter at all showed that then and there she had been oddly impressed by Fosworthy. Well, of course she
had. He had never taken his adoring eyes off her. When they had their first tête-à-tête she had been fascinated by his gentle, ceremonious devotion. His eccentricity did not
alarm her. She accepted him as the conventional, comic figure of absent-minded professor.

‘Your friend is also interested in primitive religion?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know what she is interested in,’ Undine replied sharply, ‘besides breeding dogs and killing animals or not killing them or something. Men are so absurd. Women, I
mean.’

The slip of the tongue passed right over my head at the time. But it seemed a good moment to get her to talk about herself instead of Fosworthy.

‘It was sweet of you to come to London and see him,’ I said. ‘What made you decide so suddenly?’

‘Because I shall do what I like.’

I apologised. I assured her that it was only my personal affection for Barnabas which had made me put so impertinent a question.

‘It wasn’t impertinent at all,’ she answered graciously. ‘You have every right to ask. It was someone else I was thinking of.’

‘This friend of yours?’

‘How did you guess? Yes, she was following me and she saw me say good-bye to Barnabas on Bristol station. And then we had a row. So when Barnabas telephoned me yesterday, I decided I would
come to London.’

‘Have you told her where he was staying?’

‘No! She doesn’t know where I am either,’ she added with a shade of satisfaction.

Well, if she didn’t, she soon would; but that was no business of mine. I had got all I wanted, so I pleaded a previous appointment which prevented me waiting any longer for Barnabas and
said an affectionate good-bye as gallantly as I could manage.

My intention now was to see this Miss Filk and insist on her accompanying me to the nearest police station. I arrived back at my flat with quarter of an hour in hand and limped up to the flat
roof of the building from which one had an extensive view of my own street and two side streets. I wanted to make certain that she was alone and that no monkey business was being planned under
cover of her visit.

I spotted the probable Miss Filk when she was fifty yards away on the opposite pavement. She was dressed in a black town suit, smart but severe, with a man’s cravat round her throat, and
wearing a simple felt hat. Pacing alongside her on a slack lead was a magnificent black Doberman—a very effective chaperone when committing oneself to the flat of a stranger. It occurred to
me that I should have to be pretty tactful if I meant to detain her against her will.

As soon as I saw her examine the street numbers and wait to cross the road, I hopped fast down the stairs with the aid of the banisters and was inside my front door before she rang. She was in
her late thirties, taller than I had thought and authoritative. She struck me as a woman of experience with whom it might be possible to talk frankly without bringing police—or
Dobermans—too crudely into the picture.

I supplied her with sherry and cigarettes—she puffed continuously and aggressively—and admired the dog. She said that she bred them. I then expressed my admiration of Dr Dunton,
though by now I was sure that she had only used his name as a passport. Her response was curt, so I left a pause for her to open up.

‘A Mr Fosworthy,’ she said, ‘has been making himself a nuisance to my ward.’

So that was it. The wardship was rather out of my depth. I could, however, understand it when I remembered the devastating effect which Cynthia Carlis had on some of my sex. It was more than
likely that in early youth one or two of her contemporaries had been far too brutal. And then there were the rest of us who stared at her with an almost insulting absence of desire. She must have
found men cruel and unaccountable. Even more convincing than anything else was the fact that Fosworthy, being Fosworthy, would of course have set his guileless heart on a girl who was
unattainable.

He had had, from his point of view, a damnable stroke of bad luck, caught out by his innocence not by any carelessness. His Undine ought to have foreseen that Miss Filk was likely to become
suspicious about her mysterious absences. Perhaps she did foresee it, didn’t care, even welcomed it. After all, she could not know that the looking round corners was deadly serious.

And so Miss Filk, after jealously trailing Undine to Bristol station and skulking behind a barrow load of fish boxes or racing pigeons or whatever was handy, had been doubly shocked to find that
her secret rival was a man and that the man was the missing Fosworthy. I take it that her first action was to warn Aviston-Tresco or some other associate that she had sighted him on the London
train, and that later in the day she had such a flaming row with her ‘ward’ that the girl walked out on her.

Even so Fosworthy’s trail could never have been recovered if they had not been so obsessed by his connection with me. The gaps were now easy to fill in. Somebody had obtained my address,
cautiously watched my flat and spotted Fosworthy’s first visit. That gave time for Aviston-Tresco to arrange the front seat of his van and to organise whatever simple trick would be enough to
fool Fosworthy. It was a hundred to one that after his second visit to me he had again been put out of circulation.

‘Miss Filk, I’m not going to pretend to you,’ I said. ‘I am sure you are well aware of the circumstances in which I met Mr Fosworthy.’

‘He is quite mad, you know.’

‘He is certainly eccentric when he talks about your ward. Otherwise I find him reliable for so quixotic a person.’

‘You believe what he has told you?’

‘He hasn’t told me anything except that he suddenly found his feeling for Miss Carlis getting in the way of some personal creed of his.’

It was only then that I noticed an unsteady brilliance in her eyes. I warned myself that I had better be careful. Whether she had come to negotiate or not, she was in a savage temper and more
likely to blow up than to listen.

‘Then why have you financed him?’

‘I have not exactly financed him. I lent him money because he was obviously in trouble and I couldn’t help liking him. I am very sorry that he can’t keep away from your ward,
but it was not my primary intention to make things easier for him.’

‘I am quite sure it was not.’

She said this slowly and contemptuously, and I thought it was time to give her something which could be passed back.

‘I’m a working mining engineer, Miss Filk,’ I assured her, ‘and I know the geology of the Mendips and what one can or can’t expect to find there without being told
by Mr Fosworthy. Really you can leave him out of it.’

As I see now, I could not have said anything worse. It looked as if I had learned all that Fosworthy could betray, and was making a futile attempt to protect him by admitting it.

There was an awkward pause, so I leaned forward to scratch the ears of the supercilious dog. I have a faint recollection of raising my head in alarm. Probably the blow was already on its way
downwards.

The next thing I knew was that I lay on the floor of a van with a pillow under my head. To my newly opened eyes it seemed to be quite dark. This worried me until, through the back window, I saw
lights flashing past. I stayed quiet, except for slightly shaking my head to see that it belonged to me.

It was a fair guess that I had been coshed by Miss Filk. Never having been coshed before, I could not tell how efficiently she had done it. I felt more drowsy than ill so that I knew she could
not have hit me hard enough to lay me out for more than a few minutes. Without actually knowing what happened, I assume that Miss Filk had come provided with a syringe to keep me quiet. As a
breeder of sleek, expensive Dobermans she was probably quite accustomed to using it.

How they carried me out of my flat after Miss Filk had telephoned that she had got me I do not know, but again it is not difficult to guess. I lived only one floor up. and most of the other
tenants were out all day at their places of business. No one was likely to see my removal from flat to front door. For the short passage from front door to van—well, it wouldn’t be
beyond Aviston-Tresco’s powers to provide an official-looking stretcher and a couple of St. John’s Ambulance caps.