Chapter 5
‘But my daughter wasn’t in the car.’
Seldom had Sergeant Camb felt so sorry for anyone as he did for this woman who lay against the piled pillows. His heart ached for her. And yet she was in one of the nicest private rooms in the hospital; she had a telephone and a television; her nightgown was a silly frou-frou of frills and spilling lace and on her thin fingers the rings – diamonds and sapphires in platinum – rattled as she clasped and unclasped the sheet.
It’s true what they say, money can’t buy happiness, thought the simple sergeant. He had noticed there were no flowers in the room and only one ‘get well’ card on the table by the chair where the policewoman sat. From her sister, he supposed. She hadn’t anyone else now, not a soul in the world. Her husband was dead and her daughter…
‘I’m very very sorry, Mrs Fanshawe,’ he said, ‘but your daughter was in the car. She was travelling back to London with you and your husband.’
‘They didn’t suffer,’ put in the young policewoman quickly. ‘They can’t have felt a thing.’
Mrs Fanshawe touched her forehead where the dyed hair showed half an inch of white at the roots. ‘My head,’ she said. ‘My head aches. I can’t remember things, not details. Everything’s so vague.’
‘Don’t you worry,’ said Camb heartily. ‘You’ll find you’ll get your memory back in time. You’re going to get quite well, you know.’ For what? For widowhood, for childlessness?
‘Your sister’s been able to supply us with most of the details we need.’
They had been close, Mrs Fanshawe and Mrs Browne, and there wasn’t much about the Fanshawes Mrs Browne hadn’t known. From her they had learned that Jerome Fanshawe had a bungalow at Eastover between Eastbourne and Seaford and that he and his wife and daughter had driven down there for a week’s holiday on May 17th. The daughter Nora had left her post as an English teacher in a German school before Easter. She was between jobs, at a loose end, Camb had gathered, otherwise nothing would have induced her to accompany her parents. But she had accompanied them. Mrs Browne had been at their Mayfair flat and seen them all off together.
They had left Eastover days earlier than had been expected. Mrs Browne couldn’t account for that, unless it had been because of the wet weather. Perhaps no one would ever know the reason, for Jerome Fanshawe’s Jaguar had skidded, crashed and caught fire five miles from the hospital where the sole survivor now lay.
‘I won’t bother you for long,’ Camb said gently. ‘Perhaps you can’t remember much about the crash. Do you think you could try and tell me what you do remember?’
Dorothy Fanshawe had forgotten who these kind though tiresome people were, just as she had again forgotten where she was. Her sister had been to see her and made her very tired and various strangers had moved her and pummelled her in a familiar manner that made her angry. Then someone had told her that Jerome was dead and had waited for her to cry. Mrs Fanshawe had twisted her rings – they were a great comfort to her, those rings – and said:
‘Then it’s all mine now, mine and Nora’s.’
They thought she was wandering and they went away. She was glad to see the back of them with their interfering ways and their lack of respect. There was only one person she wanted to see and that was why she stared so searchingly into the young pretty face of the policewoman. But she had been in a coma, she wasn’t mad. She knew very well this wasn’t the right face. ‘Am I in London?’ she asked clearly and briskly.
‘No, Mrs Fanshawe,’ said the sergeant, thinking how quavering and weak her voice was. ‘You’re in Stowerton Royal Infirmary, Stowerton in Sussex.’
‘You seem very well-informed,’ said Mrs Fanshawe, pleased because she had succeeded so well in pulling herself together. ‘Perhaps you can tell me why my daughter doesn’t come to see me? Haven’t they told her I’m here? Nora would want to know. She’d come home.’
‘Oh, Mrs Fanshawe…’ The policewoman sounded very wretched, almost distraught, and catching her eye, Sergeant Camb gave her a sharp reproving glance. Better leave it, the look said. Maybe it’s more merciful this way. Let her learn about it by degrees. The mind has its own way of softening blows, he thought sententiously.
‘Now back to the – er, accident,’ he said. ‘Just try and see if you can tell me what happened when you left Eastover. It was getting dark and there wasn’t much traffic on the road, it being a Monday. It had been raining and the road was wet. Now, Mrs Fanshawe?’
‘My husband was driving,’ she began and she wondered why the man’s face wore such a sloppy expression. Perhaps he had noticed her rings. She slid them up and down her fingers, suddenly remembering that the five of them were worth nearly twenty thousand pounds. ‘Jerome was driving…’ What a silly name it was. Like Three Men in a Boat. That made her giggle, although the sound came out like a harsh cackle. ‘I sat beside him, of course, and I was knitting. I must have been knitting. I always do when Jerome drives. He drives so fast,’ she said querulously. ‘Much too fast and he never takes any notice when I tell him to go slower, so I do my knitting. To keep my mind off it, you know.’
Mean and selfish Jerome was. A man of fifty-five hadn’t any business to drive like a crazy teenager. She had told him that, but he had ignored her like he ignored everything else she ever said. Still, she was used to being ignored. Nora never took any notice of what she said either. When she came to think of it, the only thing she and Jerome had ever agreed about was what a difficult, trying and utterly maddening creature Nora was. It was exactly like her to go away and not get in touch with her parents. Jerome would have something to say about that… Then there swam pleasantly into her muddled mind the recollection that Jerome would never have anything to say about anything again, never drive at eighty-five or pick on Nora or do those other terrible and humiliating things. Tonight, when she felt better, she would write to Nora and tell her her father was dead. With Jerome out of the way and all that money for them selves, she felt they would have a much happier relationship…
‘I was knitting a jumper for Nora,’ she said. What a marvellous constitution she must have to remember that after all she’d been through! ‘Not that she deserved it, the naughty girl.’ Now, why had she said that? Nora had been naughty much naughtier than ever before, but for the life of her Dorothy Fanshawe couldn’t remember of what that naughtiness had consisted. She wished the policeman or whoever he was would wipe that mawkish sheeplike expression off his face. There was no need for anyone to feel sorry for her, Dorothy Fanshawe, of Astbury Mews, Upper Grosvenor Street, W. 1. She was a merry widow now, rich in her own right, soon to be well again, the mother of a good-looking talented only daughter. ‘I don’t remember what we talked about,’ she said, ‘my late husband and I. Nothing, probably. The road was wet and I kept telling him to go slower.’
‘Your daughter was in the back seat, Mrs Fanshawe?’
Oh! really, how absurd the man was! ‘Nora was not in the car. I keep telling you. Nora went back to Germany. No doubt she is in Germany now.’
To the sergeant the jerky bumbling words sounded like the raving of a madwoman. In spite of what the doctors said, it seemed to him probable that the accident had irremediably damaged her brain. He didn’t dare take it upon himself to enlighten her further. God knew what harm he might do! Sooner or later, if she ever got her reason back, she would realize that her daughter had resigned from this German job six weeks before the accident, that she hadn’t breathed a word to her aunt or her friends about the possibility of her returning to Europe. The girl’s body had been identified by her aunt, Mrs Browne. She was dead and buried.
‘I expect she is,’ he said soothingly. ‘No doubt she is. What made your husband swerve, Mrs Fanshawe?’
‘I was knitting.’
‘Did you hit something, did a tire burst?’
‘I told you, I didn’t look. I was knitting.’
‘Did your husband cry out, say anything?’
‘I think he said “My God”,’ said Mrs Fanshawe. She couldn’t really remember anything, only that she had been knitting and then she had woken up in this bed with her nosy, bossy sister sitting beside her. But Jerome was always saying ‘My God’ or even ‘My Christ’. He had a limited vocabulary and she had stopped telling him not to be blasphemous twenty years ago. ‘I don’t remember anything else,’ she said. That was all they were going to get out of her. She wasn’t going to waste her strength. She needed it for the letter she was going to write in a minute to Nora.
