still poring over the jigsaw cannibalised from the surviving pieces of what had originally been several separate puzzles.
‘Operator, get me the police!’ urged the gaunt figure in an intense whisper, seemingly oblivious of the fact that the lead dangling down from the phone ended in a frayed mass of severed wires. Studiously ignoring everyone else, Belinda Scott sat draped over the piano whose strings and mechanism had long been removed. As Dorothy reached the door, Purvey looked up from the pages of his engagement diary for 1951 and smiled at her. ‘Thank you once again so very much for letting me impose on your hospitality like this,’ he said. ‘I do hope I’m not being too much of a nuisance.’
Rosemary glanced at the clock, which still read ten past four. She turned towards the window, attracted by a sound outside. Owing to the plastic sheeting which had been taped over the glass to improve the insulation and reduce draughts, it was impossible to see anything outside and the lounge was never aired. On hot days, and in winter when the storage heaters were turned on, the residual stench of flesh and food and urine, always pervasive, became quite overpowering. She could still hear the noise which had drawn her attention in the first place. Then she had thought it might be a fly trapped between the glass and the plastic film, but now it sounded more like a distant growling interspersed with cries which might almost have been human.
Rosemary got up and raised the lower right-hand corner of the plastic, where the tape had come loose from the frame. Through the triangle of grimy glass she could see part of the overgrown lawn at the front of the house and the double row of copper beeches which marked the line of the driveway, but there was no clue as to the cause of the strange sounds, which had now ceased.
A hand grabbed her wrist, forcing her to release the plastic sheet.
‘I’m telling!’
Belinda Scott stood glaring indignantly at Rosemary. Pinned to the bosom of her dress she wore a tattered red paper poppy which she had retrieved from the rubbish bin where it had been discarded by Miss Davis. She pointed to the loose flap of plastic.
‘I’ve caught you red-handed vandalising official property!’
‘Calm down, Belinda,’ said Rosemary.
‘Don’t you dare tell me to calm down, you old bag! I’m telling Miss Davis! They’ll stop your meals! They’ll give you jabs!’
‘No, please, I didn’t mean it!’ cried Weatherby suddenly, as though in the midst of a dream.
Grace Lebon stood up, knocking her chair over.
‘I don’t like it here,’ she announced. ‘I want to go home.’
‘Well tough titty, ‘cos you can’t!’ retorted Belinda, turning her wrath on this new target. ‘They don’t want you at home. Not that we want you here either, but we’re bleeding stuck with you, aren’t we? So if this place isn’t good enough for your royal highness, why don’t you do us all a favour and just die?’
‘MY BUM!’ shrieked Charles Symes. ‘JESUS GOD ALMIGHTY, MY BUM!’
‘No, no, please!’ moaned Weatherby, swaying to and fro. ‘Please don’t!’
Belinda Scott strode purposefully about the room, singing at the top of her voice.
‘But it really doesn’t matter if I’m always slightly pissed, ‘cos you’d none of you be missed! Y-o-u’d n-o-n-e o-f y-o-u b-e m-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-ssed!’
Purvey wrung his hands and looked on imploringly.
‘I wonder if I could possibly impose on your hospitality for just one more night?’ he pleaded to no one in particular. ‘Don’t turn me out, I beg of you. I’d gladly leave at once, only I have nowhere else to go, you see.’
‘I demand to speak to the police immediately!’ hissed Samuel Rosenstein frantically into the disconnected telephone. ‘Our lives are all in danger!’
‘GOOD JESUS CHRIST, MY BUM!’
‘I don’t like this hotel! I want to go home!’
‘N-o-n-e o-f y-o-u b-e m-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i…’
Rosemary was about to put her hands over her ears to shut out the deafening tumult when the door opened and all the residents immediately fell silent. When they saw it was only Dorothy Davenport, one or two started up again half-heartedly, but they broke off when they saw the expression on Dorothy’s face.
‘What is it?’ cried Rosemary, hurrying over to her friend. ‘What’s happened, Dot?’
Dorothy stopped just inside the door, pale and trembling.
‘I… I saw…’
Rosemary took her arm.
‘What? What is it?’
Dorothy burst into tears.
‘Oh Rose,’ she sobbed, ‘there was blood everywhere! His clothes ripped to shreds and great gashes all over his face and hands!’
She shivered.
‘God knows what they can have done to him, poor man.’
To whom?’ asked Rosemary.
Dorothy looked at her friend dully.
‘George Channing,’ she said. The corned beef millionaire.’
CHAPTER 2
‘And what do you make of this interesting development?’
The two friends were sitting side by side in their usual places. Dorothy’s hands and lips were still quivering and her eyes sightlessly scanned the opaque screen of the window. The other residents, exhausted by their recent outbursts, had resumed their stupor.
‘I suppose it was something we should really have foreseen,’ Rosemary went on. ‘Nothing is more usual, after all, than for the principal suspect to become the next victim. Indeed, my reluctance to consider such an eventuality was perhaps at least partly due to a feeling that the device had become rather hackneyed.’
Dorothy gave a convulsive sob. She reached out and took her friend’s hand.
‘He’s dead, Rose.’
They’re all dead,’ Rosemary returned briskly. ‘We shouldn’t have any victims otherwise.’
Dorothy shook her head violently.
‘This is different, Rose. This is serious. They really killed him!’
Rosemary raised her eyebrows.
‘”They”, Dot? Do you think there’s more than one person involved, then?’
‘You know who I mean! They were carrying him in when I crossed the hallway. There was blood everywhere, his face was scarcely recognisable. It looked as though he’d been ripped apart by some…’
Rosemary withdrew her hand with a genteel shudder.
‘There’s no need to descend to vulgar melodrama, Dorothy, even if…’
She broke off abruptly.
‘Oh Dot!’ she laughed. ‘You are clever!’
Dorothy stared at her blankly.
‘You completely took me in!’ Rosemary went on admiringly. ‘It’s the classic technique, disguising the essential clue in a passage of gory sensationalism, and I almost fell for it. “His face was scarcely recognisable.” Of course! That’s the solution!’
Picking up the shapeless mass of frayed yarn which Dorothy had unravelled, she started to wind it rapidly into a neat ball.
‘We’ve established that Randolph Fitzpayne assumed the identity of George Channing in order to do away with Hilary Bryant. Now that has been achieved, he needs to cover his tracks so that he and Lady Belinda Scott can elope to their villa in Amalfi…’
‘Antibes.’
Rosemary nodded and smiled.
