Алистер Маклин - The Satan Bug

“Dr. Baxter and Mr. Clandon dead? Murdered?” Bryson’s face was almost as pale as his wife’s had been. “I don’t believe it.” I looked at his face again. He believed it all right. He listened to the sounds coming from the bathroom and then said with as much angry reproach as his shaken state would allow, “You might have told us private, like, Mr. Cavell. Without the girls being here, I mean.”

“I’m sorry.” I tried to look sorry. “I’m not myself. Clandon was my best friend.”

“You did it on purpose,” Chipperfield said tightly. He was normally a likeable and affable young man, but there was nothing affable about him right then. He said shrewdly, “You wanted to see how we all took it. You wanted to know if we had anything to do with it. Isn’t that it, Mr. Cavell?”

“Between eleven o’clock and midnight last night,” I said precisely, “you and your brother-in-law here were up for exactly five dances at the Friday night hop in Alfringham. You’ve been going there practically every Friday night for years. I could even tell you the names of the dances, but I won’t bother. The point is that neither of you – nor your wives – left the hall for an instant during that hour. Afterwards you went straight into your Land-Rover and arrived back here shortly after twelve-twenty. We have established beyond all doubt that both murders took place between 11.15 and 11.45 p.m. So let’s have no more of your silly accusations, Chipperfield. There can be no shadow of suspicion about you two. If there was, you’d be in a police cell, not seeing me here drinking your whisky. Speaking of whisky–”

“Sorry, Mr. Cavell. Damned silly of me. Saying what I did, I mean.” Chipperfield’s relief showed in his face as he rose to his feet and poured more whisky into my glass. Some of it spilled on to the carpet, but he didn’t seem to notice. “But if you know we’ve nothing to do with it, what can we do to help?”

“You can tell me everything that happened when you were in ‘E‘ block yesterday,” I said. “Everything. What you did, what you saw, what Dr. Baxter said to you and you to him. Don’t miss out a thing, the tiniest detail.”

So they told me, taking it in turns, and I sat there looking at them with unwavering attention and not bothering to listen to a word they said. As they talked, the two women came in, Mrs. Bryson giving me a pale, shame-faced half-smile, but I didn’t notice it, I was too busy doing my close listening act. As soon as the first decent opportunity came I finished my whisky, rose and made to leave. Mrs. Bryson said something apologetic about her silliness, I said something suitably apologetic in return and Bryson said, “Sorry we haven’t been able to be of any real help, Mr. Cavell.”

“You have helped,” I said. “Police work is largely confined to the confirming and eliminating of possibilities. You’ve eliminated more than you would think. I’m sorry I caused such an upset, I realise this must be quite a shock to both your families, being so closely associated with Mordon. Speaking of families, where are the kids tonight?”

“Not here, thank goodness,” Mr. Chipperfield said. “With their grandmother in Kent – the October holidays, you know, and they always go there then.”

“Best place for them, right now.” I agreed. I made my apologies again, cut the leave-taking short and left.

It was quite dark outside now. I made my way back down to the hired car, climbed in, drove out through the farm gates and turned left for the town of Alfringham. Four hundred yards beyond the gates I pulled into a convenient lay-by switched off engine and lights.

My leg was aching badly, now, and it took me almost fifteen minutes to get back to Bryson’s cottage. The living room curtains were drawn, but carelessly. I could see all I wanted to, without trouble. Mrs. Bryson was sitting on a settee, sobbing bitterly, with her husband’s free arm round her: the other held a tumbler of whisky and the tumbler was more than half full. Chipperfield, a similar glass in his hand, was staring into the fire, his face dark and sombre. Mrs. Chipperfield, on the settee, was facing me. I couldn’t see her face, only the fair hair shining in the lamplight as she bent over something held in her hand. I couldn’t see what it was but I didn’t have to. I could guess with the certainty of complete knowledge. I walked quietly away and took my time in making my way back to the car. I still had twenty-five minutes before the London train was due in Alfringham. The train – and Mary.

Mary Cavell was all my life. Two months, only, I’d been married to her, but I knew it would be that way till the end of my days. All my life. An easy thing for any man to say, easy and trite and meaningless and perhaps a little cheap. Until you saw her, that was. Then you would believe anything.

She was small and blonde and beautiful, with amazing green eyes. But it wasn’t that that made her special, you could reach out your arms in the streets of London in the evening rush hour and pick up half a dozen girls without really trying, all of them small and blonde and beautiful. Nor was it just the infectious happiness that left no one untouched, her irrepressible gaiety, her obvious delight in a life that she lived with the intensity of a tropical hummingbird. There was something else. There was a shining quality about her, in her face, in her eyes, in her voice, in everything she said and did, that made her the only person I’d ever known who’d never had an enemy, male or female. There is only one word to describe this quality – the old-fashioned and much maligned term “goodness.” She hated do-gooders, those she called the goody-goodies, but her own goodness surrounded her like a tangible, and visible magnetic field. A magnetic field that automatically drew to her more waifs and strays, more people broken in mind and body than a normal person would encounter in a dozen lifetimes. An old man dozing away his last days in the thin autumn sunshine on a park bench, a bird with a broken wing – they all came alike to Mary. Broken wings were her speciality, and I was only now beginning to realise that for every wing we saw her mend there was another the world knew nothing about. And, to make her perfect, she had the one drawback which kept her from being inhumanly perfect – she had an explosive temper that could erupt in a most spectacular fashion and to the accompaniment of the most shockingly appropriate language: but only when she saw the bird with the broken wing – or the person responsible for breaking it.

She was my wife and I still wondered why she married me. She could have chosen almost any man she’d ever known, but she’d chosen me. I think it was because I had a broken wing. The German tank-track that had crushed my leg in the mud at Caen, the gas-shell that had scarred one whole side of my face – Adonis would never have claimed it for his own, anyway – beyond hope of plastic surgery and left me with a left eye that could just barely tell the difference between night and day, that made me a bird with a broken wing.

The train came in and I saw her jumping down lightly from a compartment about twenty yards away, followed by a burly middle-aged character with a bowler hat and umbrella, carrying her suitcase, the dead image of the big city tycoon who spends his business hours grinding in the faces of the poor and evicting widows and orphans. I’d never seen him before and I was certain neither had Mary. She just had the effect on people: the most unlikely citizens fought each other for the privilege of helping her and the tycoon looked quite a fighter.

She came running down the platform to meet me and I braced myself for the shock of impact. There was nothing inhibited about Mary’s greetings and although I still wasn’t reconciled to the raised eyebrows of astonished fellow-travellers I was getting accustomed to them. I’d last seen her only this morning but I might have been a long lost loved one coming home for the first time after a generation in the Australian outback. I was setting her down on terra firma as the tycoon came up, dumped the cases, beamed at Mary, tipped his bowler, turned away, still beaming at her, and tripped over a railway barrow. When he’d got up and dusted himself he was still beaming. He tipped his bowler again and disappeared.