“Bye-bye, darling.”
He sat back in his chair. Bye-bye, Beatrice. Bye-bye, darling, she had said. He would never speak to her again. It was a sad little ending.
When he was clearing up before leaving the office, he remembered something which turned him sick with fear.
It was something he had overlooked, not one of the unforeseeables; and the fear he experienced was caused by the thought of what might have happened if he had not remembered it, and by the feeling that there might be something else which he had overlooked.
It was one of the most obvious of all traps, and he had nearly fallen into it: he, who thought he had planned this business so cleverly. He writhed at his own incompetence.
Fingerprints! The thing which the veriest amateur remembers! On the new bottle, the bottle with which he would replace the poison bottle, there would be his own prints. But there would not be a single print from the fingers of the woman who was supposed to have been taking the medicine: plenty of Philip Bartels’ fingerprints, and none of Beatrice’s.
He stared unseeingly through the office window.
He could rectify that, but the thought of what he would have to do increased his sick feeling: the thought of taking the dead hands of Beatrice and pressing her fingers to the bottle, the fingers of the right hand on to the top of the bottle, and the fingers of the left hand around the bottle.
“I can’t do it,” he whispered. “I just can’t do it.”
A voice whispered back inside his head: “Beaten by a little thing like that? No wonder you’re a failure.”
Bartels sighed, and knew he would have to do it after all.
Chapter 15
Bartels had no intention of going to Colchester, and no dinner appointment even if he had gone there. But he knew he had to be out of the flat when Beatrice died: he knew some of the limitations of his own character, and faced them.
He knew that, if he stayed, there was that within him which would make him cry out at the last moment: “No! Don’t drink it!” And under some pretext or other snatch the glass from her hand.
He could watch Brutus die. His philosophy, such as it was, had enabled him so far to contemplate the death of Beatrice without undue emotion except in so far as his personal safety was concerned. But there he stopped. The theories and logic broke down. He could justify the act, but he could not watch the results.
Therefore he had to be away from the flat until 11.30 or midnight. He did not wish to be with people to whom he was largely indifferent, but with Lorna, who loved him and who would unknowingly give him the strength to tide over the hour between 10.30 and 11.30.
So he took the road out of London, the Kingston Bypass, and navigated the five traffic roundabouts which led to Thatchley, and recalled how he used to think of them, once, as the Five Roundabouts to Heaven.
He assured himself that he still did, of course, and that the depression which was weighing him down was due to nothing more than the nervous tension which the day, not unnaturally, had produced in him.
He left the office promptly at 5.30. The bitter cold of the previous few days had continued. Occasional flurries of snow were still falling, and the headlights of the continual stream of cars approaching London dazzled him, so that he was compelled to drive slowly and with care.
The whine of the windscreen wiper, an old-fashioned type, added to his depression. The thing squeaked protestingly on the windscreen, and twice the blade faltered and stopped while the mechanism continued to moan ineffectually.
Once, he spoke out loud, above the noise of the engine and of the windscreen wiper and of the wind: “It’s not when you die that matters-it’s how. What are a few years more or less in the infinite, limitless realm of Time?”
And once he said: “It’s better this way. It’s better for her to avoid the suffering and the loneliness. It’s a form of mercy murder, that’s all. Mercy killing is almost condoned by society for physical suffering, why not for mental? Why not for the suffering of the mind and spirit?” It was his old argument, brought out to comfort him on his way.
But were they Five Roundabouts to Heaven? Or did they lead to Hell? They did, if the Scriptures were right. But the Scriptures, the Ten Commandments, the thou-shalt-not-kills and thou-shalt-not-
covets, were a mere set of simple rules to maintain order among a wandering desert tribe. Moses was an old fraud who had gone up into a mountain and come down again claiming Divine inspiration for some rule-of-thumb laws which he had thought up in his goatskin tent.
Did God exist? If He did, what was He thinking now of him, of Philip Bartels, scurrying through the snow and the traffic because he, Philip Bartels, needed the company of a woman to prevent him thinking too much about a deed so logical, a deed so humane?
If the deed were so humane, did he need distractions for his thoughts? A deed, a deed, distractions from a deed. And this foul deed shall smell above the earth, that’s what he had recited at school. Smell above the earth. With carrion men groaning for burial. Cassius, he had been. Not Royal Caesar. But yesterday the word of Caesar might have stood against the world.
But yesterday the word of Philip Bartels might have stood against nothing. Nor tomorrow. Nor the day after. Did he expect Lorna to make a man out of him? Could he expect that? And one laughed in his sleep, and one cried “Murder”; but that was in
Another? Wherefore
He had been Cassius, the killer, but that was at school. Cassius at school; and would Beatrice’s spirit, ranging for revenge, come hot from-heaven, if there were a heaven? And with Ate by her side cry, “Havoc, and let loose the dogs of war”? The windscreen wiper stuck again, but the blade turned upon its axis, saying: “Havoc-havoc- havoc.”
Bartels drew the car in to the side of the road until the shivering in his limbs had died away. Perhaps he was, in fact, getting a cold. Perhaps, all unknowingly, he had told Miss Latimer the truth. If he had caught a chill, if he were confined to his bed, how would that affect things?
Not at all, except that he would have to nurse himself. Alone. In some cheap hotel bedroom. He was in Cobham now, and caught sight of a hotel, and eased the car along to it, and went in and had a large whisky and soda.
He felt so much better that he ordered another. He had time for it, if he drank it quickly, as he had done the first one.
He raised the glass and was about to do so, when he paused.
He must not drink it quickly. He must drink it slowly, unconcernedly. He had already acted unwisely in ordering a second large one, in drinking the first so hurriedly.
He must linger over this one, as though he had all the time in the world, and not a care in the world, because if things, somehow, went wrong, and if his photograph were to be published in the papers, and if the barman saw it-what then? He imagined how it would go in court.
“And you were on duty at the bar of your hotel on 26 February, is that right?”
“That’s right, sir.”
“How do you manage to recall the date so accurately?”
“Because it was so bitter cold that night, sir.”
“And I believe that while you were on duty, somebody came in and ordered a whisky and soda, a large one. Do you see that person anywhere in court?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, point him out to the jury, please.”
“It was him. In the dock.”
