The Paying Guests(123)

Mrs Viney looked stricken. She wiped her mouth, wiped it again, then made a ball of her handkerchief and held it at her breast. Vera asked Frances what she knew. Where had Len been found? When had it happened? What time had the police come to the house?

‘Oh, what a thing,’ Mrs Viney said once, ‘for you and your mother, Miss Wray!’

All the time that they were talking, they kept peering over at the stairs leading back to the matron’s room. Policemen passed and re-passed, but no summons came. The muddle of echoing steps and voices went on without a pause. Frances grew increasingly uneasy – a dreadful, animal unease it was, at being separated from Lilian. She pictured her up there, frightened to death. What might she be doing? What might she be saying?

At last the matron reappeared. She darted forward to greet her – but it was Mrs Viney, of course, who was wanted. She stumped back upstairs as fast as her monstrous legs would carry her; when she returned to the lobby a few minutes later, her face was a tragedy mask again. Frances’s heart gave another leap of fear at the sight of her – but she had already started on a noisy account of what had happened. Oh, wasn’t it atrocious bad luck? Didn’t it beggar belief? Poor Lil had been in the family way for the first time in years and the doctor was saying that the shock of Len’s death had brought on a miss.



At least now, Frances thought, Lilian could admit to being ill. When they returned to the matron’s room they found her looking pale but tearless, sipping another cup of tea. She met Frances’s gaze just once, and after that kept her eyes lowered, but Frances could see that some of the panic had gone from her expression, and that made her own anxiety die down. Even Mrs Viney grew calmer. For here, of course, was something she could understand, a homely female crisis over which policemen and doctors, with all their nonsense, could have no sway. She held her hand to Lilian’s forehead as she drank; she put back the hair from her white face. As soon as her teacup was empty she took it and handed it to the matron.

‘Thank you for that, nurse. But I shall take my daughter home now. Vera, pass us Lil’s hat and coat. Here you are, my darling, you just put your arms through here.’

The matron, alarmed, went off to fetch the inspector; he returned in time to find Mrs Viney doing up the buttons of Lilian’s coat. With his face as smooth as ever, he said he was sorry to hear that Mrs Barber had fallen ill. Had they known about her condition, they of course would never have asked her to identify her husband’s body.

‘I shall speak to Constable Hardy about it, you may be sure,’ he said. To which Mrs Viney answered hotly, ‘Yes, I should think you will! A disgrace, I call it, asking a wife to do that! Police or no police, we’d be quite within our rights to bring an action against you!’

Lilian put a hand on her mother’s arm. ‘It’s all right. It doesn’t matter.’

‘Doesn’t matter?’

‘I just want to go home.’

And, yes, said Inspector Kemp, Mrs Barber should certainly go home now and do all she could to recover her strength. Sergeant Heath would report to the coroner, and would advise him to hold over opening the inquest until Monday, by which point it was to be hoped that she would be well enough to give her evidence.

‘As a matter of fact,’ he told her, ‘I shall be glad of the extra days. It’ll give us more time to gather information. We’ll keep you posted as to our progress, of course. You’ll remain at home now?’

‘Oh, she’s coming back with us,’ said Mrs Viney, before Lilian could respond. ‘Don’t you think that’s the best thing, Ver? We’ll take her to ours. She can go in with you and Violet, and —’

Lilian took in what her mother was saying. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No, I don’t want to go to the shop. I want to go back to Champion Hill.’

‘Back there? It’ll give you the horrors! You ain’t in a fit state. Look at you!’

‘I don’t care. I just —’ She glanced at Frances. ‘I just want to go home, and have all my own things around me.’

And again the inspector agreed. Yes, it might be best if Mrs Barber stayed at her own address for now, in case he and his men ‘should need to get hold of her in a hurry’.

Had the situation been different they could have walked up the hill in twenty minutes. As it was, Sergeant Heath led them back to the cobbled yard and the four of them piled into another taxi, Mrs Viney and Vera sitting with Lilian between them, each holding one of her hands, Frances looking on uselessly from the small seat opposite. The rain was falling as heavily as ever; it came down the gutters in a torrent. Champion Hill had one or two pedestrians on it, hurrying beneath umbrellas, but apart from that the street was quiet; Frances was glad of that, at any rate. As they pulled up before the house her mother’s pinched face swam into view at the drawing-room window, and by the time they’d got across the front garden she had opened the door for them.

For an aimless few moments they all stood about in the hall. No, nobody could believe it. It was too horrible for words.

‘It just ain’t sunk in,’ said Mrs Viney. ‘Poor Lenny, as never harmed no one! I tell you this much, Mrs Wray, I hope they catch the devil that done it, and I hope to God they hang him! I hope they hang him twice over! Once for what he did to Lenny, and a second time for what he’s done to Lil!’