Knock, Murderer, Knock! Page 12

As she left her room the chambermaid watched her, and running along to her companion on the same corridor, whispered, “Miss Astill has gone to call on Miss Brendon.” And the whisper, too, twisted along the corridors and down the stairs, increasing in intensity until it reached the ground floor and blew out at the front door, roaring at the people outside on the terrace: “MISS ASTILL HAS GONE TO CALL ON MISS BRENDON!”

  Miss Brendon, as Inspector Palk had so recently discovered, was an old lady whose age was given as anything between seventy-four and eighty-two, and was therefore known to the other residents as “the oldest inhabitant.” Her skin was of the texture and hue of the leather effigies which used to be carried in procession round the streets of old Chester, but, for the rest, she reminded you of a particularly unattractive bird. Her nose was beaky, and her hands clawlike, and her dark violet-lensed glasses, seen beneath a fuzzy crop of white hair, gave her the appearance of a peering white owl.

  She was attended by a stocky little woman with straight grey hair, who always seemed to have walked recently out of a laundry, with her striped dress stiffly starched, and her face and hands smelling of yellow soap. This was Rogers, who had first entered the Brendon household as a girl of sixteen, and had insisted on remaining with Miss Brendon when she took up her residence in the Hydro.

  Both of them had been at the Hydro for fifteen years, though, as a matter of principle, Miss Brendon gave notice every Lady Day.

  Miss Brendon nodded with pleasure when Rogers announced her visitor.

  “Glad to see you, Eppie,’’ she said. (Miss Astill’s Christian name was Ephemia.) “Come and let me have a look at you.”

  Miss Astill crossed the room and bent down over the couch under the window, which Miss Brendon occupied during the day. She allowed the old lady to pass her gnarled hands over her dress, which was her way of looking at her.

  “That’s a nice collar you’re wearing, Eppie. Irish crochet, I can see. Ah, they don’t make it so good as that nowadays.’’

  “Oh, Miss Brendon,’’ said Miss Astill, in the high-pitched, girlish tones she always adopted as being suitable in one so much younger than her hostess, “you make such beautiful lace yourself!”

  “Indeed and she does, miss, and so I often tell her,” agreed Rogers, nodding towards a faded red velvet tatting-cushion on a side table. “But it’s hard to get her to do any nowadays. The only time she’ll touch it is when she knows you’re coming. Peevish, she gets.”

  “Rogers has a new way of doing my hair,” said Miss Brendon, abruptly changing the subject. “Show her, Rogers.”

  Rogers took an inch-wide black velvet ribbon, and depressed Miss Brendon’s untidy halo of hair with it, while her mistress listened for approval.

  “Perhaps it does make you look younger,” said Miss Astill cautiously, and was quite unprepared to see the ribbon torn off and flung on the floor.

  “Take it away, take it away!” screamed Miss Brendon. “I won’t have it. At my time of life I must look older, not younger. Who cares whether I’m seventy or eighty? But if I were a centenarian I should have a telegram from the King! It’s only foolishness for us to try and look younger than we are at our age, Eppie.”

  Miss Astill’s reply was luckily checked by the arrival of a maid in neat black house-dress and pleated cap and apron, balancing a large metal tray on her shoulder.

  Miss Astill removed her gloves.

  It was not pleasant, she thought, to take tea in an overheated room where an old lady lay during the day and night with all the windows closed except when the doctor was expected. She trusted that her visit would be a profitable one.

  When she had accepted her first cup of tea, and had bitten off a comer of buttered toast, she inquired after her hostess’s health in the earnest manner which befitted the most important of all Hydro subjects of conversation.

  Miss Brendon smiled with pleasure. Eppie was so correct and ladylike, she thought. Now she could discuss all her most interesting symptoms during tea.

  “As you see, my dear,” she said, munching a piece of soft toast, “I am well enough to receive you, but my tubes are still very raw. I didn’t sleep a wink all night.”

  Rogers stooped and removed a crumb from the carpet.

  “She slept like a log, miss,” she whispered, then straightened herself and said aloud, “I heard you snoring, Miss Brendon.”

  Her mistress smiled patiently.

  “Ah, that’s what you think, Rogers; but I never snore. It’s the wheezing in my tubes that you hear. I wonder that it doesn’t keep the whole Hydro awake.”

  “It sounds rather bad,” said Miss Astill, inducing a note of sympathy into her voice.

  “Oh, I’m used to it, my dear, I’m used to it. But the worst is that I can’t get any action.”

  “You mean...?”

  “Yes, dear. I don’t believe in all these new-fangled medicines the doctor recommends. Senna pods were good enough for my mother, they ought to be good enough for me. I’ve had no action for six days!”

  But this was too much for Rogers.

  “Oh no, miss,” she said emphatically, “you forget. Your memory isn’t as good as it used to be, miss. Two days, miss, it is, and time yet.”

  Miss Brendon turned her short-sighted eyes towards Rogers.

  “How often must I tell you not to interrupt the conversation?” she said; then, apologizing to Miss Astill, “Rogers is such a trial. I ought to have given her notice years ago, poor thing, but I haven’t the heart.”

  This had no noticeable effect on Rogers, and Miss Astill welcomed the break in the conversation, for she had not come to hear all about Miss Brendon’s ailments.

  ‘These family retainers are so much better than hired servants,” she said. “You are very lucky to have someone like Rogers, I assure you. Just look at the trouble Mrs. Napier has with that awful Nurse Hawkins. She grossly neglects her.”

  “Flirting with the Admiral still, is she?” asked Miss Brendon with relish.

  “Yes. It really makes you wonder whether –”

  “Oh no, I shouldn’t think there’s anything like that in it, Eppie. It’s marriage she’s after. I don’t think she’d be put off with anything else. Now, that Blake girl was different, she deserved to come to a bad end.”

  “I try never to speak ill of the dead,” said Miss Astill piously, “but when I think of her running about naked, and taking the name of the Lord in vain, I have no regrets. None.”

  “She was a bad lot, from all accounts,” agreed Miss Bren-don. “But what about the eldest Marston girl and the chauffeur? There’s another one for you, and I wouldn’t say that she wasn’t a good bit worse than the others.”

  Miss Astill stiffened.

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  Miss Brendon cackled with laughter.

  “I could tell you, couldn’t I, Rogers?”

  “Indeed and you could, miss, if it so happened that you had a mind for it,” agreed Rogers.

  “Yes, I saw them sitting in the car right underneath this window. She was pretending to drive, but I saw him put his arms right round her and kiss her. You mark my words, there’ll be a scandal about them before long.”

  “Yes,” said Rogers, “such an exhibition I never before saw in my life. Whatever would they get up to in the dark if that’s the way they carry on in broad daylight?”

  Miss Astill recovered from her first surprise that Miss Brendon could have seen the pair as she had described them: it was always a little confusing to remember that she saw things through Rogers’ keen eyes.

  “The brazen little hussy!” she exclaimed, when the full significance of the incident had become clear in her mind.

  “Of course, I wouldn’t dream of saying anything about it to anyone but you, Eppie, but I know how discreet you are.”

  Miss Astill set her lips very firmly together, then suddenly she smiled.

  “Well, really you have amazed me,” she admitted. “But now that you have mentioned it, I did have a feeling
about it myself. Nothing I could have put into words, you know, just a feeling. But what a disgusting thing! A common chauffeur! How shameless!”

  The conversation passed from Hydro scandal to old times, and Miss Astill, realizing that she had exhausted Miss Brendon’s stock of scandal for the day, rose to go.

  “Is that really the time?” she exclaimed, drawing on her gloves in readiness for the journey up to her own room. “Well, good-bye. Thank you so much for a delightful afternoon.”

  She moved across to the door, and as she passed the walnut table which the velvet tatting-cushion occupied in full glory, she bent down over it, touching the noisy bobbins.

  “You must really use this more than you do, dear Miss Brendon,” she said.

  Chapter 22

  The following morning Winnie Marston came down from her bedroom on the first floor by the main staircase, and, turning right, walked along the corridor until she reached the double glass-panelled doors marked, “Treatment-Rooms,” and entered the ladies’ section on the left.

  Nurse Hawkins was standing at a table in the centre of the largest of the three rooms, heating a poultice over an electric ring. She smiled cheerfully, and Winnie found herself wondering who had originally designed the softly draped headdress which is so becoming to most women.

  “Good morning, Miss Marston. Douche and massage, isn’t it?” she said brightly. “Will you come and take off your clothes, please?”

  She led the way to one of the cubicles opposite the door and drew back the dark-brown curtains with a sharp jingle of brass rings.

  “Have you brought a bathing-cap? That’s right. Call when you’re ready.”

  Winnie quickly undressed and fitted the rubber cap on her head. At her call, the nurse handed her a hot towel through the curtains, and Winnie, wrapping it round her body, stepped out on to the cold tiled floor, holding a folded piece of linen in her hand.

  “Is this anything to do with me?’’ she asked.

  “Oh yes,” replied Nurse Hawkins. “You tie it round your waist with the tapes.”

  Winnie shook it out of its folds, and gazed at the plain, machine-hemmed material, with its long strips of tape at either end.

  ‘‘What on earth for?” she asked. “Won’t it get wet when I have the douche?”

  “Yes,” replied the nurse, “but it’s just to keep you covered. Our patients don’t like to be naked altogether.”

  “Well, do you mind if I don’t wear it? I can’t bear the thought of having a clammy piece of linen clinging round my middle. I’m afraid I’m not ashamed of my body.”

  Nurse Hawkins thought that Winnie had no need to feel ashamed, as she glanced at the firm young limbs which she sluiced up and down in the spraying water. She increased the heat gradually, until the finger of the indicator crept towards a hundred degrees and Winnie’s body became rosy, then decreased it again, and after a final tepid flourish, turned off the water, and wrapped a fresh hot towel round her patient.

  When she was dry, Nurse Hawkins again changed the towels, and led Winnie into a smaller adjoining room in which were several couches ready made up with pillows, sheets, and grey hospital blankets. The clothes on the nearest couch were neatly turned down, and Winnie got between them and found her feet against a welcome hot-water bottle.

  “It’s the right leg, isn’t it?” asked the nurse. She shook up a pillow and slipped it under Winnie’s leg, tipped some talcum powder into her hand, and began to massage it with preliminary tentative strokes. “How did you manage to hurt it?”

  “I was playing tennis with my sister, and the grass was slippery after the rain. I fell and twisted my leg under me and strained it in some way. The doctor says I might easily have broken it.” Her eyes glanced round the room. “It feels so strange to be in here,” she went on. “My sister and I always look on the treatment rooms as a place for old people only. I never thought I should come in for treatment myself one day.”

  “Oh, we’ll soon put you right,” smiled the nurse. “It’s surprising how comforting massage can be when there’s something wrong.”

  It was not long before their conversation turned to the subject which of late had superseded all others in the Hydro.

  “It was dreadful about Miss Blake, wasn’t it?” remarked Nurse Hawkins.

  Winnie shuddered.

  “Yes, awful. I liked her and I liked Sir Humphrey too. It’s hard to believe that he could have murdered her so callously. I wonder what really happened.”

  “Oh, there’s no doubt that he was guilty. I expect he was in love with her and got her into the usual trouble. Some girls are such fools, though I must say that she looked pretty smart, but you can never tell. Girls do the silliest things when they’re in love. They do say that he was always in and out of her bedroom, and though I don’t hold with all this scandal-mongering, there’s no smoke without fire, you know.”

  “I suppose he had a wife alive and couldn’t marry her,” reflected Winnie. “It was a dreadful shame. She was so pretty.”

  “Yes, she was,” replied the nurse. “But to my way of thinking, she spoilt herself with all that make-up.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. After all, it’s the fashion. I’d do the same if I had the chance; but Mother and Dad are so old-fashioned. Why, Millie and I had a terrible struggle to get them to allow us to have our hair shingled even! Just because some silly ass once said that a woman’s glory was her hair.”

  “Well,” said Nurse Hawkins, increasing the firmness of her rhythmical strokes on Winnie’s leg, “a little powder and lipstick in reason help us all, but these London girls are getting a bit too flighty, and overdoing it altogether. I was in a big West End nursing-home before I came here, and I could tell you a few things about them that you’ve never heard before. They’d come in with beauty-boxes as large as week-end cases, full of skin tonics and creams and eyelash pencils and false eyelashes. You should have seen them make up their faces before they went in for an operation... Laugh! I used to die of laughing nearly. If only they could have seen their faces when they were under the anaesthetic they’d never have done it, I can tell you. The ether makes all the colours run together, and you never saw such sights as they look. The surgeons used to get hopping mad about it, and we’d have to clean up the faces before they’d begin to operate. You’d think that they’d be glad of a chance to give their faces a rest while they were in a nursing-home, wouldn’t you? But not they! It’s ‘Nurse, where’s my beauty-box?’ almost as soon as they come round after the operation’s over.” She looked at her watch and gave a final stroke to the leg. “There,” she said, pulling down the bedclothes, “you must rest now for a good half-hour.”

  Winnie looked dismayed.

  “Oh, but, Nurse, I’m not ill! I must get up now. I – I’ve a most important engagement to keep. I can’t stay, really.”

  “It’s no use having massage unless you rest afterwards,” said Nurse Hawkins professionally. “The doctor is most particular about that. Could I give anyone a message for you?”

  Winnie blushed.

  “No. Oh no, thanks. I expect it will be all right.”

  “Very well. I’ve got another patient to attend to now. You can get up in half an hour, but you’ll probably find that you feel sleepy in a minute. I’ll give you a call if you’re not up when I come back.” With a nod and a smile as bright as her clean white overall, she rustled starchily away.

  She busied herself for several minutes at the long table in the centre of the largest room of the baths, placing a tin of antiphlogistine (known to members of the nursing profession more familiarly as “Auntie Flo”) in a saucepan of water and substituting it for a pan of sterilizing instruments over the electric burner standing on a square mat of asbestos. She had barely taken her hand from the saucepan handle before Mrs. Dawson walked into the room. Nurse Hawkins greeted her with a smile.

  “Just on time, Mrs. Dawson,” she said, for the majority of her patients in the Hydro were so lax that she had learned to appreciate punct
uality.

  “I always try to work to a time-table,” answered Mrs. Dawson. “You have to if you’re a writer, you know. If I didn’t sit down for my regular two hours a day with a pen in my hand and manuscript paper in front of me, I should never have finished one book, let alone three. But I nearly forgot my appointment altogether this morning, and I must say that I don’t see why you had to change it so suddenly from yesterday. I’m sure the doctor knows nothing about it. He knows that this is a very inconvenient time for me because I usually write in the mornings. I never could concentrate after luncheon.”

  Nurse Hawkins chose to be uncommunicative.

  “It was more convenient,” she said, and ushered her patient through the door marked “Electric-Room.”

  This room was small and severe, with no windows or skylight, so that, whatever the time of day, it was yellow with electric light. Around the walls was a dado of electric plugs in front of which stood a variety of machines – silent robots ready to spring into life with the turning of a switch. At the moment only one plug was in use, connected by a thick black flex with an enormous kettle of shining aluminium, which puffed out great clouds of steam. Nurse Hawkins switched it off, and added some of the boiling water to a small waist-high bath which already contained cold water, testing it with a muscular elbow, while Mrs. Dawson seated herself in a chair beside it and took off her silk shirt blouse.

  ‘‘You needn’t bother to fetch me a magazine,” remarked Mrs. Dawson. “I’ve brought a book.”

  Nurse Hawkins finished her preparations with quick but careful fingers, moved to one of the smaller machines, turned one switch and then another. A low humming began to fill the room and increased in intensity as she watched the control dial.

  “Are you quite comfortable?” she mouthed, for her voice could not now be heard in the little room above the sound of the machine. Mrs. Dawson replied with a cheerful nod, and the nurse left the door of the electric-room ajar and went to test the temperature of the heating poultice. Apparently satisfied with this, she rapped her overall pocket to make sure that the tin of talcum powder was still there, switched off the electric heater, took the metal canister of antiphlogistine out of the hot water with a pair of metal forceps, wrapped it in a towel, tucked a roll of lint under her arm, gave one swift glance round the room, and walked out of the baths.