A Nice Class of Corpse

∨ A Nice Class of Corpse ∧

15

In the Entrance Hall Mrs Pargeter paused for a moment of grim satisfaction. She had no doubt that she had seen off Miss Naismith, but she was still angry that the accusation had ever been made. None of the other residents would have been attacked frontally in that manner, and, though usually Mrs Pargeter was the most tolerant of individuals, another legacy of her life with the late Mr Pargeter was a certain sensitivity to imputations of criminal behaviour.

Still, she thought with a wicked little surge of glee, she had effectively diverted them from questions about what she was doing in Mrs Selsby’s room in the middle of the night.

She looked out through the glass of the closed front doors to the greyness beyond, and saw a small figure wound up in a plum-coloured coat walking briskly away from the hotel on the other side of the road. In spite of the black fur hat pulled down over the ears, she had no difficulty in recognising Mrs Mendlingham.

Mrs Pargeter decided she might put her own coat on and go for a walk.

The coat in question was a mink, which the late Mr Pargeter, always the soul of generosity, had presented to her after a particularly successful business venture, and that morning she was glad of its warmth. The weather, which had not been good for some time, seemed now to have lapsed into icy melancholy, as if it had lost faith in the idea of there ever being a summer. The wind carried a stinging spray – or maybe it was rain – and the sea was lost about fifty yards out in sticky fog.

It was not a morning for recreational walking, and Mrs Pargeter wondered where Mrs Mendlingham was headed with such apparent determination. As she emerged from the Devereux and felt the first breath-snatching blast of the weather, Mrs Pargeter could still see the small plum-coloured figure striding along the front and, without hurrying, she had no difficulty in keeping her quarry in sight.

Mrs Mendlingham was walking along towards the Arun estuary, past the closed Smart’s Amusements, on whose wall even the perky figure of Mickey Mouse looked forlorn. The exposed metalwork of the mini-roller-coaster known as the Mouse Run gave the edifice the unfinished look of a building site. Mrs Mendlingham continued straight ahead, past the sad fairy-tale turrets of the Giant Slide.

Mrs Pargeter was intrigued. Her reconnaissance of Littlehampton two days before had been thorough and, as far as she could remember, Mrs Mendlingham appeared to be walking into a dead end, a little corner between the beach and the river.

Suddenly the plum-coloured figure was no longer visible.

Mrs Pargeter did not increase her pace. There was nowhere Mrs Mendlingham could have gone, except into one of the sea-front shelters.

These concrete structures were designed to keep the wind off the bench seats inside them, and on days when the wind was less blustery and erratic, perhaps they did. That morning they seemed only to attract little eddies of cold air, providing a home for the small hurricanes of the sea front. In one or two of them Mrs Pargeter saw old people propped in the corners, faces purple with cold between their scarves and hats, but showing rigid determination to get away for a little while from the four walls of their homes (or their Homes).

Mrs Mendlingham was not sitting in the first group of shelters, but there were some others further on, with glass partitions, which faced over the river rather than the sea. As she rounded the corner of one of these, Mrs Pargeter saw the plum-coloured figure she was seeking. Mrs Mendlingham was hunched against the end wall of the shelter. One hand in a fingerless woollen glove held a hard-covered black notebook, while the other wrote in it at great speed.

“Good morning.”

The old wild eyes darted up sharply at Mrs Pargeter’s words, and in one movement, almost too quick to be seen, the notebook and pen were concealed under the folds of the plum-coloured coat.

“Good morning,” said Mrs Mendlingham. There was a slyness in her voice, the tone of someone congratulating herself on a successful deception.

“Do you mind if I join you?”

Mrs Mendlingham’s expression was not welcoming, but she voiced no objection as Mrs Pargeter sat on to the bench and swaddled herself in the mink coat.

In front of them the Arun flowed murkily. The tide was going out. A small fishing dinghy with an outboard motor swept past, tide-assisted, as if it were a power boat. The cold wind swirled and eddied around them.

“You come out here to write?” asked Mrs Pargeter.

Again the old face filled with suspicion and cunning. “What if I do?”

“Difficult to get privacy at the Devereux, I find. Even after my brief stay.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s the sort of place where everything you do seems to be observed.”

This didn’t prompt any reaction, so Mrs Pargeter made her point even clearer. “Last night I was seen going into Mrs Selsby’s room.”

There was a sly smile from Mrs Mendlingham. “Yes.”

“An unlikely time to be awake…”

“I don’t sleep well these days.”

“No. No, it does seem more difficult as one gets older, doesn’t it? Do you have anything to help you sleep?”

Mrs Mendlingham snorted dismissively. “The doctor gives me pills. They work for a little while. But after two or three hours I wake again.”

Mrs Pargeter nodded. “Every night?”

“Most nights.”

“How did you come to see me last night? I didn’t see you.”

“I heard footsteps and just opened my door a little.”

“Yes, of course, you’re on the first floor, aren’t you?” Mrs Pargeter paused before continuing, gently, “And I suppose you’d do that any night…If you happened to be awake, and hear footsteps, you’d open your door a little to see who it was…?”

“I expect I would, yes,” replied Mrs Mendlingham, unguarded.

Mrs Pargeter suddenly made her enquiry less languid. “Two nights ago, the night Mrs Selsby died, I heard a commotion and a little cry on the first-floor landing. What did you see that night?”

The old lady looked shocked. She opened and closed her mouth a few times before replying. “I saw nothing that night. I didn’t hear anything. I slept through that night.”

“Ah,” Mrs Pargeter murmured peaceably. “Rather a pity, that, wasn’t it?”

“Why?”

“Well, if you’d heard something, you might have been able to save Mrs Selsby.”

“I hardly think so. She died immediately.” Fearing that this had given away too much, Mrs Mendlingham lamely added, “I gather.”

“Yes. Yes. That’s what I gather, too,” Mrs Pargeter reassured her. “Did you know Mrs Selsby well?” she asked diffidently.

“No. No. Well, you get to know people when you’re living in the same building, of course you do. But I didn’t know her well, no.”

“Did you like her?”

The shoulders shrugged in the plum-coloured coat. “We were hardly soul-mates. She was a bit of a busybody.”

“Always nosing her way into other people’s business, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“A bit of a tell-tale, too…?” Mrs Pargeter floated this idea with care. She had no basis but instinct for the suggestion. “Tended to sneak to Miss Naismith, did she…?”

Her instinct had been right.

“Yes,” Mrs Mendlingham replied. “Always. If she found out a secret about someone, she was incapable of keeping it to herself.”

“Did she find out anything about you…?”

Mrs Mendlingham opened her mouth to reply, then thought better of it and took refuge in her old-lady vagueness. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Not for the first time, Mrs Pargeter found herself wondering how much of an act Mrs Mendlingham’s senility was. Frequently the old lady appeared almost completely gaga, but she was also capable of sustained concentration, and at times the sharp intelligence in her faded eyes was positively disturbing.

Mrs Pargeter tried another tack. “Miss Naismith asked to see you this morning.”

The old eyes stared unfocused towards the dunes on the other side of the river. Mrs Pargeter repeated her sentence.

“What? Oh yes.” But Mrs Mendlingham still seemed to be giving only part of her attention.

“Apart from your telling her about seeing me last night, may I ask what else you talked about?”

Mrs Mendlingham was too disturbed by the thought of Miss Naismith to notice the directness of Mrs Pargeter’s inquisition. “Miss Naismith,” she mumbled, “is a cruel woman.”

“Cruel because she wants you to move out of the Devereux?” hazarded Mrs Pargeter.

This was greeted by a little cracked laugh. “She won’t succeed, you know. You can get anything you want in this life with money. That’s all she cares about. For all her airs, Miss Naismith will do anything for the right amount of money.”

In the strange atmosphere between them Mrs Pargeter felt she could risk another impertinent question. “Are you a wealthy woman, Mrs Mendlingham?”

She got no reply except another laugh, but it was a laugh full of confidence, cunning and even triumph, a laugh that said, “Yes, now I’m a very wealthy woman.”

“And you’re still sure you saw nothing on the first-floor landing two nights ago?”

The eyes came into sudden sharp focus. “Nothing.” The word was almost spat out. “Nothing. Nothing happened on the landing that night. You’ll never find out about anything happening on the landing that night. And I wouldn’t advise you to be nosey, Mrs…Mrs Whatever-your-name-is. Nosey people can get hurt, you know.”

Abruptly, with another manic giggle, Mrs Mendlingham rose to her feet, shook her coat around her, pulled her fur hat down over her ears, and set off walking briskly along the front towards the Devereux.