Bettina had coloured a little, pleased with the compliment.
They were short one cup, because Mrs Joy had had two, and the tea lady had returned to the meeting temporarily with a cup for Mr Bernstein just as Bettina was unpacking a large cardboard box. On the table she placed three large bottles of petrol.
Mr Cleveland said something about getting close to the product.
It seems unlikely that Bettina ever found time to present her campaign. Perhaps her natural impatience got the better of her. But one can imagine her standing at the head of the table and the men leaning back and smiling, enjoying the little theatre that comes from a good presentation.
'This,' she might have said, 'is petrol.'
A joke, the sheer obviousness of it.
And if the wicks were not already in the bottles she might well have enjoyed the suspense as she put them in. She must have kept their interest – no one left the room just yet.
Did she say anything at all about her cancer?
If so, one imagines she would have had to do it quickly, as a curse almost, and there would have been no time for questions.
Miss Dobson, whose desk is outside the boardroom, beside the Managing Director's office, thought she heard Mrs Joy shout the word 'Mucus' and then there was that terrible explosion, followed by two more in sharp succession and all at once the overhead sprinklers poured down, drenching the eighth floor and Mr Cleveland ran out of the boardroom and collapsed screaming in front of her. She had not recognized him. He rolled into the curtains and set them on fire.
Only one advertisement survived that inferno (certainly no people did) and beneath its bubbled cell overlay one could read the headline, set in Goudy caps and lower case: 'Petrol killed me,' it said and it is an interesting reflection on the art of advertising that it was four hours before anyone bothered to read the body copy and learned that the death in the headline was a death by cancer.
So when the police interrogated Harry for the first time, on the shocked grey ghastly day in that dull little office in the Mobil Research Department, there was only one motive he could think of.
'They must have rejected her ads,' he said.
The faces at Palm Avenue had a grey waxy look. They were numbed and did not question the search but admired, in a vague distracted way, the style in which the police seemed not so much to search as to caress pieces of clothing, stroke objects, and when they slid their big blunt hands behind couches there was a deftness, almost a tenderness, that con-tradicted their gruff masculine manner. They stood on chairs and peered at the dead insects inside light shades; they worked their way along bookshelves and removed books with a gentleness that could be taken for respect.
There were only two of them, Macdonald and Herpes – whose red inflamed face suggested some connection with his unfortunate name – and although they were both titled Detective, it was Macdonald who appeared to be in charge. They were both big men but broad rather than tall, a physical type that is sometimes compared, often with admiration, to a brick lavatory. They wore shorts and long white socks. They carried clipboards.
It was Herpes who ushered everyone into the kitchen and Macdonald who began to interview them, one at a time, in the dining room. There was little conversation in the kitchen and what there was centred on such problems as whether a person wanted coffee or tea and such prosaic details as names and dates and places of birth. To all this, they submitted meekly.
The more serious work took place next door and from time to time the smooth murmuring in the dining room would be broken by the lump of a sob as someone collided with some painful flotsam of memory.
It was the thirteenth of September, that time of the year when one night can be hot and steamy and the next bitterly cold, as if there were forces still arguing for a continuation of winter and others for the beginning of summer and summer would win one night, and winter the next.
The forces of winter were in control on the night after Bettina's death.
Breath hung in the air in the kitchen as they sat around the table like effigies of themselves with only their suspended breath to suggest that they were flesh and blood.
They were not yet told how or why Bettina had died. The police had only just read Bettina's body copy, and deliberately said nothing of her cancer. The questioning, they said, was routine.
The following interview with Joel was not atypical, although it could hardly be judged to be routine. Imagine then, the policeman sitting at the head of the dining-room table (how far away those lunatic nights seemed now), a radiator at his feet and some thirty books, mostly paperbacks, stacked neatly on the table. The titles of these books might suggest a house with a far more serious political bent than it had. Kropotkin's revolutionary pamphlets, Ernest Mandel on Trotsky, an Everyman edition of
'Do you have any particular theory about the cause of cancer?'
'No, not really.'
'Do you think cancer is political?'
'I don't know.'
'Is it someone’s
'I suppose so.'
'What do you mean exactly?'
'Well I've heard people say it's caused by chemicals, but I don't... '
'Which people were these?'
'There was a woman, I don't know her real name, called Honey Barbara.'
'Were there many meetings where this was discussed?'
'No, not meetings. Everybody just got drunk.'
'Have you ever seen this book before?'
'No.'
'But that is where you sleep, on that mattress?'
'That's right. I told you already.'
'This book was under that mattress.'
'Many people used the bed, all the time.'
'Many people? You said you slept only with Mrs Joy!'
'Many people, during the day, to sit on, like a chair.'
'And although you've slept on top of this book, you've never seen it?'
'No.'
'How thick would you say it was?'
'Two inches.'
'You slept on top of a two-inch-thick book and never felt it?'
'No.'
'Do you think people who cause cancer should be killed?'
'I’ve never thought about it. Is that what Bettina did?'
'How tall are you?'
'Why do you want to know?'
'How tall are you?'
'Five foot six and a half.'
And so on.
They saved Harry till last. He entered the room with every intention of co-operating, of being perfectly polite. In return he hoped to have some clarification of his wife's death. There was a feeling of shame in the kitchen. As if they had all done something wrong and would; in due course, be punished.
But Macdonald was soon asking him about Honey Barbara.
'I don't know.'
'They said she was your girlfriend.'
'No.'
