Buffet for Unwelcome Guests(54)
Twenty minutes later, you are coming up to the heath, scorching hell for leather along the empty roads. You had intended to knock up the pub people, ask them for change for the public telephone outside; but through the window you can see them all crowded round the television set watching the World Cup final; and what more natural than to tap on the pane—you know them quite well—and make questioning faces, sketch a query mark on the pane: clasp hands in mock prayer as they signal back, ‘All square; extra time,’ and turn back to huddle over the set again.
Helen safely out of the way, of course; you told her to meet you at the Dell. So you can go to the call box, make the legitimate call to the house to ask if she’s there; and then…
Five o’clock; and the policeman has been dead for half an hour and more—yet here is his voice asking for ‘George’—you know well enough that George is on the switchboard today—giving his nickname, all the little authenticities… Breaking off with vague alarms, coming back to scream out in gibbering fear that he’s being attacked….P.C. Cross: alive and speaking on the telephone at five o’clock when you are known to be fifteen miles away from the scene of his death.
He had reckoned on suspicion fastening, possibly, upon Rupert; but Helen—that had been horrible….The white light had grown more and more frightening then, blazing day and night inside his mind with a dazzling confusion as when one looks into the eye of the sun and sees only blackness. But this had been a whiteness, infinitely more terrible—a pain-filled, terror-filled radiance that blotted out all but the pain and the terror of the ensuing days. They had been very kind; considering what had happened, they had all been kind. They’d told him that he should not die nor even go to prison, but to a place where he might hide himself from the light inside his head. He’d been afraid of that, afraid of the truths that would face him when he was no longer blinded by the light. But they’d said that he hadn’t been—what they called ‘responsible’; because of that heredity, because of that very thing that Uncle Gemminy had been going to speak about—because of that long ago day when he had fled, a small boy, shrieking with mortal fear, away from Grandad, standing suddenly in the doorway carrying the great hatchet and stained down his front and all over his hands, with blood….
The gardeners had left the flower-beds and now at a discreet distance followed them; keeping a wary eye also—no point in humiliating and antagonising them, the trick psychs, said nowadays—upon other couples, other little groups all strolling in towards the big, barred buildings ahead; jingling the heavy keys, herding in their charges, sheep-like, to the grazing grounds. The old man stood aside, courteously, to usher the new-comer through the huge door with its wire-netted, splinter-proof glass. ‘Well, thank you, I enjoyed that. Someday I’ll tell you about my murder. Killed off my whole family one night, you know, with an axe. Not my fault; my father was mad before me, as mad as a hatter. And it’s years ago now; my goodness, yes!—when that happened, you’ll have been no more than a child.’
The Scapegoat
‘STAY ME WITH FLAGONS,’ said Mr. Mysterioso, waving a fluid white hand, ‘comfort me with apples!’ There had been no flagons, he admitted, in that murder room thirteen years ago, but there had been apples—a brown paper bag of them, tied at the top with string and so crammed full that three had burst out of a hole in the side and rolled away on the dusty floor; and a rifle, propped up, its sights aligned on the cornerstone, seventy-odd yards away and two storeys below.
And at the foot of the cornerstone the Grand Mysterioso tumbled with his lame leg doubled up under him, clasping in his arms the dying man who for so many years had been his dresser, chauffeur, servant, and friend—who for the last five years, since the accident that had crippled him, had almost literally never left his side—tumbled there, holding the dying man to his breast, roaring defiance at the building opposite, from which the shot had come. ‘You fools, you murderers, you’ve got the wrong man!’ And he had bent his head to listen. ‘Dear God, he’s saying—he’s saying—come close, listen to him! He’s saying, “Thank God they only got me! It was meant for you.” ’
Thirteen years ago—a cornerstone to be laid for the local hospital, just another chore in the public life of Mr. Mysterioso, stage magician extraordinary. But mounting to the tiny platform, leaning his crippled weight on the servant’s arm, there had come the sharp crack of the rifle shot. And in the top-floor room of the unfinished hospital wing, looking down on the scene, they had found the fixed rifle with one spent bullet. And nobody there. Up on the roof a press photographer who couldn’t have got down to the window where the gun was fixed; down at the main entrance a policeman on duty, seen by a dozen pairs of eyes tearing up the stairs towards the murder room, moments after the shot. In all that large, open, easily searched building—not another soul.