The diarist slackened the pressure and checked that there was no more breath. Then, slightly pulling out the trapped end of the pillow, the gloved hands arranged it to flop over the motionless face.
The diarist stood back to assess the handiwork. Good. Artistically satisfying. The pillow lay naturally, as if it had been displaced by the burrowing head and fallen accidentally across the drug-slackened face.
Excellent. Yes, riskier than Mrs Selsby’s death, maybe raising more possibilities for suspicion, but basically another job well done.
The gloved hands were rubbed together with satisfaction.
Then the diarist returned to bed, fell instantly asleep and slept well until the morning.
∨ A Nice Class of Corpse ∧
22
It was at breakfast in the Admiral’s Dining Room the next morning that Mrs Pargeter noticed the absence of Mrs Mendlingham. The old lady did not like early morning tea, so was not regularly woken by Loxton’s seven-thirty knock. Her erratic memory, however, did sometimes make her late for meals and usually, if she hadn’t appeared for breakfast by eight-fifteen, Miss Naismith would send Newth up to rap peremptorily on the bedroom door. But on the morning of Friday the 8th of March, in view of the events of the previous day, Miss Naismith did not insist on this. Now that she was confident of soon being rid of Mrs Mendlingham, she could afford to be magnanimous.
For Mrs Pargeter the old lady’s absence rang an immediate and instinctive alarm bell. Muttering an excuse about having left a handkerchief upstairs, she picked up her handbag, left the Admiral’s Dining Room before Loxton had served her kipper, and hurried upstairs.
Inside Mrs Mendlingham’s room, her body lay exactly as the diarist had left it. The brightness of day intensified the light through the curtains, which, though in a bolder stripe across the bed, diffused throughout the room.
Mrs Pargeter paused inside the door. The stillness of the body, the face hidden by the pillow, both gave her an ugly premonition.
One of the late Mr Pargeter’s useful pieces of advice would have met with Miss Naismith’s approval. Any wife of his, he insisted, should at all times carry a pair of gloves in her handbag.
Mrs Pargeter, obedient to him in all such matters, habitually followed this recommendation, and she put on her gloves before going across to confirm the suspicion, of which she was becoming increasingly certain, that Mrs Mendlingham was dead.
Carefully, she raised the edge of the pillow. The congested face and the staring bloodshot eyes left no room for doubt.
Mrs Pargeter let the pillow drop back.
Miss Naismith would have to be informed.
But that could wait for a minute. Mrs Pargeter moved across to the bedside table and, without touching anything, checked the contents of the bottle and tumbler. The appropriate dosage was clearly written on the label in Dr Ashington’s neat, thin hand; there was no possibility for error. And yet, assuming that the Doctor had handed over a full bottle the previous day, considerably more than the permissible ten 5 ml teaspoonsful had disappeared. The viscous dregs at the bottom of the tumbler also suggested a considerably higher density of medicine than the recommended dilution.
Of course, it was possible that Mrs Mendlingham, in her fuddled state, had overdosed herself from the bottle, which had been so injudiciously left by her bed. It was possible also that the pillow had slipped across her face and suffocated her by accident.
These things were possible, but Mrs Pargeter, building on the suspicions that she had formed about Mrs Selsby’s death, inclined to another interpretation of what she saw.
She looked around the room. There was something that should have been there that she could not see.
With gloved hands, she opened the drawers of the bureau and the bedside table, but still did not find what she was expecting.
She moved back to the bed, and, very gently, felt under the covers to the right side of the corpse. Triumphantly, she pulled out a hard-covered black notebook.
She checked her watch. She had been out of the Admiral’s Dining Room for still only three minutes. She could allow herself another couple before her absence might be noticed.
She opened the book, which was filled with Mrs Mendlingham’s scratchy, uneven writing. It was not exactly a diary, though it did contain descriptions of certain events. In fact, it was a rather sad document, the record of an old lady’s fight against failing memory. As Mrs Mendlingham said, she had tried to fix certain facts in her mind by writing them down, and many of the entries were just statements of information, some of them strangely moving.
The new resident’s name is Mrs Pargeter. Mrs Pargeter. I must remember that. It’s an unusual name, but I must remember it. Getting names wrong is just the sort of thing Miss N. notices and I don’t want to give her any more ammunition. I must stay at the Devereux. I don’t think I could cope with another move at my age. Mrs Pargeter. Mrs Pargeter. I must get it right.
But Mrs Pargeter had no time to linger sentimentally. She flicked through towards the end of the writing and found the entry she was looking for.
What I saw on the landing keeps coming back to me. It is terrible, my memory’s so erratic I sometimes think I dreamed it, but then that comfort is denied me and I know for certain that it really did happen. It haunts me. The pressure to tell someone is enormous. But who? The new resident, Mrs Pargeter, seems sympathetic, but dare I trust her?
It was almost the last entry in the book. Mrs Pargeter’s face was grim. If only Mrs Mendlingham had taken the decision to trust her, a life might have been saved.
But it was too late for such thoughts.
With great care, Mrs Pargeter replaced the notebook under the bedclothes where she had found it.
On the landing she took off her gloves and put them back in her handbag.
Then she went downstairs to tell Miss Naismith about the latest death at the Devereux.
∨ A Nice Class of Corpse ∧
23
Dr Ashington was instantly summoned. He examined the new corpse and, though his personal opinion veered towards a theory of accidental death, he called in the police. There were elements in the case, his own prescribing for Mrs Mendlingham, Miss Naismith’s possible carelessness in leaving the medicine bottle at the bedside, which might give rise to unfortunate gossip and conjecture unless the death were the subject of an official enquiry.
Miss Naismith was extremely unhappy about the idea of the middle-class peace of the Devereux being shattered by an invasion of policemen, but she could see the logic of Dr Ashington’s decision. There were sufficient cases even in the quality Sunday newspapers (which were the only ones that Miss Naismith was ever seen to read) about negligence and downright criminality in the running of private hotels or Homes for her to wish to avoid even a hint of suspicion about the Devereux.
The arrival of the police ensured that Mrs Mendlingham’s death prompted considerably more reaction than that of Mrs Selsby. Perhaps it would have done, anyway. Mrs Selsby, after all, had seemed to be fading away for years, while Mrs Mendlingham had been a much more assertive and controversial figure. Then there were the circumstances of the last few days of her life, the accident with the tea, the summons to Miss Naismith’s Office, the wild hysterical attack, the calling of the doctor.
And not to be discounted was the fact that hers was a second death in a very short period. The inquest of the previous day had neatly tied the bow on the closed file of Mrs Selsby’s life, and just when the residents of the Devereux might reasonably expect to be getting back to their normal routine, the pattern had been again disrupted by this new death.