Cold, Lone and Still

10: The Disperser of Dreams

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Once the magistrates had refused, on the evidence (if one can call it that) given at the hearing, to commit Bull for trial, the heat, of course, was on the rest of us again.

So far as Bingley was concerned, I think that, for a time at least, Bull remained the chief suspect, but I am sure I came next on the list. It still seems to me illogical that this should be so. All I had done, so far as he was aware, was that I had found the body and reported the fact. It was not as though he knew anything about what had happened at Crianlarich or the strange business of the body in the ruins on Rannoch Moor.

Todd was also being pestered. Hera rang me up when I got back from the office one evening to tell me that Todd had turned up at her flat and wanted to have a talk with me.

‘Then why didn’t he come here instead of going to your place?’ I asked.

‘He didn’t know when you got home from work.’

‘A likely excuse! All right, I’ll come round, but I can’t stay long. I’ve brought a manuscript home with me and Sandy wants my opinion on it as soon as I’ve read it. Be seeing you in about a quarter of an hour and you take jolly good care that Todd leaves when I do. I don’t trust that picker-up of unconsidered trifles.’

‘So that’s what you think I am!’

‘Forget it.’

Todd was tall, debonair and handsome — all the things, in fact, that I am not. He was also beautifully attired and his manners were impeccable.

‘How are you?’ he said. ‘Bearing up all right?’

‘I might be, if that perishing policeman would get off my neck.’

‘Ah, you, too,’ he said, standing up as Hera came into the room with the drinks. He took the tray from her, set it down and added, ‘Poor old Bull is being needled, too. Too bad, after the beaks dismissed him without a stain on his character.’

‘I wouldn’t put it quite like that,’ I said. ‘He was guilty of dereliction of duty. He ought to have replaced that bulb as soon as he knew it had gone. When did he know it had gone, I wonder?’

‘I’ve been talking to him. The policeman has rather dwelt on the point, of course, and Bull told me what he told him and he swears it’s the truth. He did not discover it had gone until about two in the afternoon, when he needed to visit the what-have-you. He pressed the switch and no light came on, so he uttered a bold word, cursing whatever student had pinched the bulb for one of the study-bedrooms, and went up the stairs to a loo on the second floor. After that, he says, he was kept on the trot by the people who were giving the party and, although he fully intended to replace the bulb, it meant fetching a ladder (as he is too short to manage without one) and for a time he was kept so busy running back and forth for the party preparations that — well, one can see how it would have been.’

‘But when I went along that corridor to have a fag, the blighter was doing damn-all except reading a newspaper and eating fish and chips. Resting after his labours, I suppose. Anyway, what has Bingley got on you that you wanted to talk to us about?’

‘That silly little clot Patsy Carlow has given the coppers reason to believe that Carbridge and I were rivals in love — love for her, if you please!’

‘Well, those Turkish pantaloons were really rather eye-catching. Had either of you seen her in them before?’ asked Hera, ‘I thought they were very fetching.’

‘Ripeness is all,’ said Todd, ‘if you’re going to flaunt yourself in that sort of garb, and pathetic young Patsy is hardly Mata Hari. However, to your question, so far as I am concerned the answer is no. Unfortunately, of course, the middle-aged Bingley saw her in those Turkish reach-me-downs when he came in and broke up the party that Saturday, and apparently was struck all of a heap. The result is that he believes her story that Carbridge and I were wildly infatuated with her and that we fell out because of this. I told him that at the party my reaction to the bizarre garments was to give her a fatherly smack on the seat of them, and what do you suppose he said when I told him that?’

‘I can’t wait to know,’ said Hera.

‘He said, “Sexy, Mr Todd, very sexy.” ’

‘Well, apparently there are the three of us on his roster,’ I said. ‘What do you expect me to do about it? I can’t extricate myself, let alone anybody else.’

‘I know. Safety in numbers, though. As long as he’s got three of us under suspicion — well, it’s better than only one. What I wanted to say was that I’ve told him nothing about that little affray at Crianlarich and I shan’t, either, unless I have to. You know what I mean.’

‘Perfectly. Neither will I mention Jane Minch’s sore feet,’ I said, risking a shot in the dark. It went home, though.

He looked at me in a speculative way and said, ‘So you worked that one out, did you?’ He finished his drink and got up to go. ‘So it’s checkmate, is it?’

‘Let us say, with Mr Peachum, “you know we have it in our power to hang each other”. Anyway, thank goodness the law doesn’t go quite so far as that nowadays.’

‘Amen,’ he said, ‘but I think it’s only a matter of time, you know.’

‘So what on earth were you getting at?’ asked Hera, when she had shown him out. ‘How did you get him sewn up like that?’

‘Easily. It stands to reason that, once Jane’s feet began to trouble her, the rather insensitive and egotistic Carbridge would have insisted upon pushing ahead and leaving the brother and sister behind.’

‘They were all at Fort William.’

‘So were Perth and the students. My guess is that everybody except Carbridge and Todd got a lift or took the bus for the end part of the trip. That means those two blokes were alone together for the last part of The Way. From friend Todd’s reactions, I should say that my faculty of imagination, plus a logical and analytical mind, has paid dividends.’

‘You are cleverer than I thought. It must come from reading so many books,’ she said mockingly. ‘What else have you deduced?’

‘That Todd is a snake in the grass.’ She turned colour, so I added, ‘I quite like him, though, and I have nothing against snakes. Their venom has curative properties when it’s put to therapeutic use.’

It was after this that I began to have bad dreams. I suppose most people have them at times, but to me they came as an unwelcome novelty. Mostly my dreams, when I could remember them in the morning, were of the most trivial content — I had dressed wrongly for some function or had found myself on a lonely road with no idea of how I had come to be there or in which direction I ought to be going. The worst dream I had had up to the night which followed the hearing at the police court and the talk with Todd, was that my and Sandy’s authors had turned into a pack of wolves and invaded the office thirsting for my blood.

The new dreams were very much worse than that. For one thing, they persisted night after night and they were horrifying. I dreamt that Todd — strangely enough not Carbridge — had turned into the Ancient Mariner’s albatross and was hanging from my neck. I could not rid myself of him and he was stifling me with his weight.

After the fourth night of this, Hera asked me what was wrong. She thought I must be sickening for something and advised me to see a doctor. Sandy was more sympathetic and to him I told my troubles.

‘It isn’t a doctor I need,’ I said. ‘It’s something in the nature of an exorcist.’

‘Well, you’re on the books of one,’ he said. ‘Go and see her. Of course it’s not Todd you’re dreaming about.’

‘You mean I’ve substituted him for Carbridge, but I don’t think that is the case. After all, I’m not really concerned in the murder, you know — not personally, I mean. I’m sorry for any man who dies before his time, but I’m not involved beyond that.’

‘You’ve had a couple of very nasty shocks, whether your conscious mind recognises that fact or not. Then you had the harassment of believing that Bingley suspected you. You go along to Dame Beatrice —’

‘And have my head looked at?’

‘Yes, if you care to put it like that.’

Hera offered to accompany me, but I thought I should do better on my own. I said I was not going to keep her away from her job. She had some lucrative modelling on hand and I knew she did not want to lose the chance of it. Fortunately she was only too willing to listen to reason, so, having made an appointment, I went alone, as before, to the Stone House.

‘Ah,’ said Dame Beatrice, when I had described my recurrent dream, ‘and how old were we when we first encountered the Ancient Mariner and his albatross?’

Her reptilian smile and her use of the royal, the editorial and the specialist’s plural, impressed me about equally and not very deeply. I knew it was a joke.

‘I was ten and at my prep school,’ I said. ‘I had a woman teacher and she did not beat us for our misdemeanours, but caused us to learn poetry by heart. If we failed to come up to scratch, we were sent to the headmaster as stubborn recusants and he did beat us, so, of course, we learnt the stuff, however hard a grind it turned out to be.’

‘I see. Have you discussed this dream with your fiancée?’

‘No. I’ve told my business partner about it.’

‘So he is your good friend as well as your business partner. What had he to say?’

‘Well, rather strangely he said that the dream was not really about Todd. He said I was substituting Todd for someone else.’

‘I am sure he was right. In fact, I think you are substituting Todd for two other people. If you will not take my supposition amiss, I think one of them is your fiancée.’

‘Hera? Oh, no, I assure you!’

‘I am glad to hear that.’ She did not look very glad. In fact, those brilliant black eyes summed me up very shrewdly indeed and it was not difficult to imagine what she was thinking. She was right, too, although I was not prepared to admit it. I did find being engaged to Hera something of an onus at times. Her character was so much firmer than my own that I was often at a disadvantage when we discussed anything or argued about it. But Dame Beatrice had more to say. ‘What ought you to have told me about Mr Carbridge when last you were here?’

So I told her what had happened at Crianlarich. She nodded solemnly and then suddenly cackled.

‘You would have preferred to punch Mr Todd, I suppose, but, to employ a phrase much used by Laura, he is above your weight, a taller and a more robust man than yourself.’

‘I wasn’t going to let Hera see me take a hiding.’

‘Very wise. A jousting knight must win or retire from the lists.’

‘Besides, although I somewhat distrust Todd, he doesn’t irritate me in the way Carbridge did.’

‘Well, Mr Melrose, we will take it that you are suffering from suppressed hysteria due to your recent disquieting experiences. With your collaboration, I shall place you under light hypnosis and then I shall talk to you. You may answer me if you wish, but you will remember nothing of what we say, and the dream you have described will not recur. However, as I read the evidence, I do not think that at present you are very anxious to be married.’

‘Well, I am and I’m not,’ I said truthfully.

‘Elucidate.’

‘Well, I’m very fond of Hera and I admire her very much, but when we announced our engagement to my business partner, Hera added that she wanted to come into the firm. She has some capital and I was willing to consider the idea, although I was not too keen on it, but Sandy was not at all in agreement, so that damped me down a bit. The last thing I want is any kind of a break with him.’

‘Your business needs an infusion of money?’

‘Well, I suppose most businesses do, but I don’t much want Hera to go out to work after we’re married. I pointed out to her that it would be jollier to find her all nice and domesticated at home when I got back each evening.’

‘A typical male reaction, of course, selfish, possessive, hidebound and utterly understandable. I wonder whether she expected to be a sleeping partner or an active partner in your business?’

‘Well, that’s where Sandy and I are not in agreement. I say she would only be a sleeping partner drawing her small share of the profits and staying out of the office. I say that she will take no part in making decisions or even meeting any of our authors. They show up from time to time and take us out to lunch or we take them out to lunch — that kind of thing. Sometimes they come to raise hell about their contracts and try to sick us on to get to grips with their publishers, but it’s all in the day’s work and I don’t intend Hera to be a part of it.’

‘How does your partner see her role, then?’

‘Sandy says women are never satisfied unless they’ve got a finger in the pie. I’m bound to admit that in Hera’s case he may be right.’

‘Difficult for you. Shall we proceed?’

So I suffered her to put me under what she called ‘light hypnosis’ and all that I remembered afterwards was the sound of her beautiful voice reciting poems from Peacock Pie before I came under the influence. What magic formula she used, once she had me under control, I have no idea. When I came to, we had tea, at which we were joined by Laura, and I drove back to London feeling calm and refreshed. I slept that night, and for many nights, without, so far as I can remember, dreaming at all. It was only after waking in the mornings that I wondered what I had told Dame Beatrice.

‘So you didn’t talk about the bodies,’ said Sandy.

‘I have no recollection of what we talked about. If the body on Rannoch Moor had been a figment of my imagination, I might still be worried, but what I found was a real man. I mistook him for Carbridge, that’s all. I had given my head quite a bash, you know. There was only one thing about the interview which worried me a little. Well, not worried me exactly, but made me feel a bit of a fool.’

‘Dame Beatrice’s diagnosis about hysteria, I suppose.’

‘Yes. Previously I had connected hysteria only with nervous females.’

‘What about shell-shock? If she had used that word to describe your condition, you wouldn’t have minded. Now I’ll tell you something else. You’ve been under stress for some time. I noticed it before you ever went on that Scottish jaunt, and now these two encounters of yours with murdered men have triggered off something which has been dormant for months. Why didn’t you tell Dame Beatrice what is really worrying you? — or you could tell me. We’re both safe enough as the repositories of guilty secrets.’

‘But I haven’t got any guilty secrets, dammit! All the same, I’m not too sure now that I ought to have agreed to hypnosis. I mean, it makes one so vulnerable.’

‘Think nothing of it. She would never make any capital of anything she learned that way; no doctor would. The point is — has her treatment worked?’

‘Like a charm, so far.’

‘Well, then, what are you worried about?’

‘I’ll tell you. Now that Bull has been cleared —’

‘Oh, but he hasn’t, you know. I thought the head beak made that abundantly clear. Bull has been put back into circulation, but only while Bingley gets more evidence. If what you tell me about Bingley is a correct assessment, he’s not the man to let go while he’s got his teeth into a suspect. You know that, as well as I do. You’ve said as much.’

‘There’s something Bingley doesn’t know, unless somebody has tipped him off. I’ve been waiting and dreading the day when it comes out that I had a row with Carbridge at Crianlarich.’

‘Well, you told me you had one with Todd, and he’s still alive.’

‘Yes.’

‘Could anybody else in the party have known about the quarrels?’

‘Not unless Carbridge himself had talked. Unfortunately, he was the sort of gregarious babbler who very easily might have done. Oh, I suppose Perth knew — and possibly the Minches.’

‘If anybody knew and had blabbed to Bingley, you would have heard about it long before this, but no wonder you’ve been worried. No wonder, either, that it was Carbridge you thought you had found on Rannoch Moor. I understand everything now. Let’s talk about something else. I’ve got my problems too, you know. This business of you and Hera. She’s been on to me again about joining the firm and having a partnership. I still don’t like the idea, Comrie. I don’t want any takeover bids and Hera is a very determined woman.’

‘She won’t kick in enough capital to make her anything but a very junior partner. We could do with a bit more money, couldn’t we?’

‘Well, yes, but in this case I’m sure the interest we should have to pay in the form of her making a takeover bid would be too high. Would you mind very much if I turned her offer down very determinedly indeed? We’ve stalled, up to the present, but I’m willing to bear the brunt of telling her firmly that there’s nothing doing. I quite see that it would be very embarrassing for you if you had to slip her the news.’

‘We’ll stick together over this. I am altogether of your point of view, although I shall have to involve you to some extent, of course.’

‘Help yourself. It won’t break this camel’s back if you load me up.’

‘After all, I don’t want her running round in this office, and that for more reasons than one. For one thing, as I’ve told her, I want her home when I get there after a hard day’s work. I’ve always said so to her.’

I envisaged a stormy interview but, although she set her lips and tilted that obstinate chin, she took my arguments calmly.

‘You may think differently when we are married, if ever we are,’ she said. ‘I believe you’ve cooled off.’

‘I’m only waiting for you to fix the date,’ I told her.

‘I’ve got commitments for the autumn, but some time in the New Year ought to be all right. And don’t worry about me and your agency. I knew, before we went to Scotland, that Sandy would talk you over.’

‘Nothing of the sort! You know very well that I want a wife, not a business partner. That’s the size of it.’

‘I could be both, but never mind.’

I gave Sandy the news that I was to be married in the New Year and that I had been firm about the partnership.

‘How did she take it?’ he asked.

‘Fairly lamb-like. She’s disappointed, of course, but she has accepted the situation with more grace than I thought she would. She said she knew what our decision would be.’

‘Since when?’

‘Since before she and I went on that tour — or so she said. She must have had the partnership in mind for months.’

‘Oh, well, now she will have a good many weeks to get used to the idea that she is not joining the firm. Nothing like a bit of a cooling-off time to resolve these little difficulties. Women are far more reasonable and amenable than men over business arrangements. By the time you’re married, everything will be all right.’

I was not too sure that either ‘reasonable’ or ‘amenable’ applied to Hera, but I did not argue. She had agreed with our decision, that was all that mattered — and she had given me a tentative date for our wedding. I noticed that she and Sandy had both mentioned ‘cooling off, but I dismissed the doubts I had begun to feel when I visited the Stone House and which, I admit, I had experienced while I was in Scotland; and I felt grateful to Hera for having so far accepted our refusal to take her into partnership. I even began to read the advertisements of houses for sale in the more desirable commuter districts. I had no intention that Hera and my children should live in London and, in any case, I did not want her too near the office. She had formed a habit of ‘dropping in’ when she was not otherwise engaged, and this I intended to do my best to check when we were married.

However, even this inconvenient habit she ceased entirely after our talk. We met for dinner most evenings, sometimes at my flat — where my housekeeper was quite pleased to cater for two instead of one, especially as we had an arrangement that I should pay her a little extra on these occasions, and that she should get off early and leave the washing-up until the morning. Sometimes I dined with Hera, who did her own delicious cooking when she was at home. Mostly, however, we went out for the meal and then spent the rest of the evening, and occasionally the night, together, either at her place or mine. All my qualms about marrying her vanished and about three happy weeks went by with no unpleasant surprises and no evil dreams. Bingley, of course, was still about, but even he and his suspicions troubled me no longer.