VIII 1950: The confrontation
Daisy was sitting at her kitchen table, quietly smoothing the facets of a plaster sculpture with a small rasp. The winter sunshine came in through the closed window, the sunrays warming her face just enough to be perceptible. Her fingers felt rough from the dry plaster dust, but the smooth edges she was working on were agreeable to the touch… On a couple of shelves on the wall near her, there were other little sculptures, Dinky Toys cars and aeroplanes, a miniature Eiffel Tower, and a balsa wood model of a Lancaster bomber.
Presently a man entered the kitchen, wearing a lady’s dressing gown that was slightly too small for him. He stopped by Daisy’s chair, bent over her from behind, put his arms around her shoulders and kissed her neck. “Good morning, lovely. Sorry that I fell asleep again… Not very polite of me.”
“Don’t worry, darling, you were tired, and for a good reason… And you see, I can amuse myself quite well.”
“What is this? Supposed to be a work of art? You an artist now?”
“No, I wouldn’t say that. Just having some fun.”
“But it is abstract art!”
“Not for me. I call this ‘Kitchen table’… I’m just trying to make a miniature model of a table as I perceive it.”
“A table? It looks very strange for a table. I don’t see any right angles or straight edges.”
“That’s my point exactly. My perception of angles is very vague, and when I follow the edge of a table with my fingers, it curves away from me left and right… The table-top is smooth, but slightly wavy, don’t ask me why… The only thing I perceive the same way as you, is that there are clear edges to a table-top, so my little model has lots and lots of pronounced edges…”
“And it looks like something by Picasso… no offence.”
“Ah yes, Picasso! Unfortunately, we blind people are not allowed to touch the sculptures in museums and galleries… But recently an artist friend of mine made a small copy of a Lipchitz for me. It’s there on the upper shelve… And I must say that cubist sculpture makes a lot of sense to me…”
“Fascinating! And you sitting here so peacefully with your little rasps and gouges: that I find fascinating too… You were a real tiger in bed last night… and this morning!”
“You too, skipper,” Daisy giggled, “you too!”
She put the plaster piece and her tools back on the shelf and started to sweep and mop the dust away from the table. “Let’s have breakfast together, shall we? What can I fix you? Is eggs and bacon all right, and some coffee?”
“Yes, perfect. You know, sweetheart, I love it when you call me ‘skipper’. It reminds me so of the good old days…”
“Yes, I also feel transported back in time in your company, and that’s a very agreeable feeling… Here we are, reminiscing like two old crones… How old are you now by the way?”
“I’m twenty-eight, and you?”
“Twenty-seven! So you were, what, twenty-two or so when you took me along to Berlin that night?”
“Yep… And I was the oldest of the crew. They respected my seniority: Daddy knows best!”
“Oh, but you did impress us immensely with your maturity!”
“Maturity at twenty-two! The bloody war did that to you: they stole our youth from us… We were just a bunch of kids, operating the most deadly weapons in history.… and half of us paid for that with our lives. And then: not as much as a thank-you afterwards…”
“I know, I know… Here, butter your toast; the eggs and bacon will be ready in a jiffy!”
While they enjoyed their breakfast, they kept discussing the past, and the crew. “I see that you have Derek’s cute little Lanc in your collection…”
“Yes. Actually, that funny little Lanc started me on my own sculpture projects…”
“And then I was missing Jerry Milton, our outstanding wireless, yesterday?”
“Yes, we haven’t seen those two since ’45, when they went back to Canada and Australia…”
“Well, you know, as a BOAC pilot I could arrange some rebates for them if we want to organise a real reunion one day…”
“Excellent idea, darling, we must keep that in mind… You know, I can’t tell you how thrilled I was yesterday, when you finally showed up for one of our little gatherings… Why didn’t you ever join us before?”
“Well, you know how it is: I was very busy, flying all over the world for British civil aviation. And besides, I always had the feeling that I was only the new skipper, and that I didn’t really belong…”
“That, my dear Rick, is really silly! We were all absolutely thrilled to see you last night. And on D for Daisy at the time, the crew just adored you, I was a witness to that…”
“Well, I don’t want to sound rancorous, but Ralph’s presence was always quite dominating… To give you an example: when we were shot down and taken prisoners, it turned out that I was the only member of the crew who didn’t speak any German! That is when I realised what kind of a leader Ralph had been… He was brilliant. It gave the crew tremendous self-confidence to know that if we had to bail out we would have every possible advantage on our side…”
“But darling, you were also very good at generating self-confidence: in the chaos above Berlin you stayed so calm, that was incredible!”
“Thanks, Daisy. At any rate, how the others pleaded with the mob! Those German villagers would have slaughtered us right there if it hadn’t been for the fact that the whole crew could speak the language!”
“Well, if it can be any consolation to you: even I was jealous of the crew and felt inadequate, sometimes… But on the other hand, they all keep Ralph’s memory alive in a way that no one else can…”
“Yes, I get that… and what I found very touching is that even our old batman has joined the club…”
“Victor! Oh yes, the most loyal supporter of all! And do you realise that he is something of a kingpin in the London underworld? Of course he didn’t mention it last night, but if you’re looking for something special, a Chinese mistress, an exotic narcotic or forbidden weaponry, Victor is your man!”
“Well-well! And I thought he had always been a butler, and would go back to being a ‘gentleman’s gentleman’…”
They were silent for a while, enjoying one another’s company while they were eating. Then Richard Clayton took Daisy’s hand and said, “Dear Daisy… I do hope this is not meant to be a one-off?”
“Oh no, of course not! The only thing is… I’m still very much involved with Ralph, if you know what I mean, and I wouldn’t want to make you feel like a second fiddle or something… But having said that, I do like the idea of an intercontinental pilot with a girl in each port of call, and that I should become your girl in London…”
“That sounds good to me; I’ll take you up on that. And maybe I can take you along on a flight, sometime. I started my career on South American Airways, before we were incorporated into BOAC, and I still fly to Rio on a regular basis. Would you like to visit Rio one day?”
“Oh yes! Do they sell models of the Sugarloaf Mountain as a souvenir?”
“Certainly! I’ll take you to the top on the cable car and buy you a model right on the spot…”
“Wonderful! You know, with Bee, a friend of mine, we actually climbed the Eiffel Tower: we took the stairs!”
“Well, there you are then. We’ll make a real world traveller out of you!”
As soon as Rick had washed and dressed, Daisy asked him to go downstairs and pick up her mail for her in the lobby. “I’m expecting some news from my solicitors…”
When he came back there was indeed a solid brown envelope among the letters, with the name of a well-known solicitor’s firm printed on it. “Aren’t the services of such a firm rather expensive?”
“It’s my father who pays their bills. He’s a banker and he can afford it. And he assures me they are the best…”
“And why does my sweet Daisy need the services of such excellent solicitors?”
“Well, it’s because of a cousin of Ralph’s, who inherited the title after my father-in-law died. This cousin is trying to contest Ralph’s will and claims that he should have inherited everything Ralph left to me… My father was furious on my behalf, of course, and insisted I should hire good solicitors and fight for my rights. What you have there is their monthly report. You must open it and read it to me…”
“Well darling, I’ll be honoured…”
While Rick opened the envelope, Daisy explained, “My solicitors have argued that the properties Ralph possessed before his father’s death are not part of the deeds that Cedric, the cousin, is entitled to after the old earl died…”
“Sounds complicated… Let’s see… Ah, here it is!” Rick started reading the report aloud. It appeared that Cedric’s solicitors were now arguing that the flat in Tufnell Park was part of the residences of the Earl of Haverford. That in a spirit of conciliation, the Earl was willing to drop his prior claim, if in exchange Daisy would be willing to relinquish this modest property…
“What!” Daisy cried, “now he wants to evict me from my flat!”
“Wait a minute, there is more…” The solicitors recommended that she accept the proposal. For one thing, the Justice of the Peace was bound to be very receptive to this offer of conciliation, and on the other hand, one could argue that the flat was of very little value compared to the sum total of the deeds bequeathed by Ralph…
“Yes, but I live here; this is my home, for Pete’s sake!”
Rick finished reading the letter, “The case has to be submitted to the Justice of the Peace before the end of March, so therefore, dear Madam, we would appreciate if you could communicate your decision to us before the end of the month…”
“What day are we, anyway?”
“It’s the sixteenth of January…”
“Hmm, not much time left to think it over, then… Anything else?”
“No, that’s it… I’m awfully sorry to be the one who has to bring such bad tidings…”
“It’s all right, darling… So the first claim was just a smoke screen all along: they didn’t stand a chance with that at any rate. And now Cedric wants to take away my flat only to annoy me… How clever and dishonest these people are! You know, sometimes I wonder why we fought the war… The Germans were the bad guys and we were supposed to be good and decent. Well, in my experience there is no difference at all!”
“My poor Daisy, it seems to me that you’ve made a very hard landing into the real world.”
It was two o’clock in the morning on a cold winter night. Daisy walked up the driveway to Bottomleigh House in the pitch darkness. According to her information there would be no moon, and probably a cloudy sky. But to her it made no difference at all: the path was utterly familiar; it could have been bright daylight; she navigated confidently on her memory of untold strolls with Ralph up and down this lane. When she neared the house she could perceive it’s presence by the echoes of her steps on the gravel. Then, instead of turning to the right, where the porch and the front door were situated, she turned to the left, walked stealthily in the direction of the garages, turned around the corner of the building and counted her steps along the basement windows, at the foot of the terrace wall. Presently she stopped, put on a pair of fine lady’s wrist gloves, and then she stooped, groped for the fourth window, felt the doctored latch give way as it should… Some things never change in old houses. She opened the basement window noiselessly.
Now she was inside the house, in the basement. She easily found the boiler room, the main valve, and she turned the boiler down a notch or two. Nothing outlandish, just enough to let the temperature drop a little. Then she went upstairs. During the next half hour Daisy took stock of Bottomleigh House. She checked every room except Cedric’s bedroom and verified that there was no one else on the premises. She moved around swiftly: after all these years she had the place mapped in her mind, utterly familiar, for her it was like walking those corridors in bright daylight.
She needed to make some preparations; execute a carefully thought out plan. In the hall on the ground floor, at the back of the stairs, there was a small box, where you could disconnect all the phones of the House from the outside world. Daisy did so. “Remember to reconnect afterwards,” she admonished herself. Then she went into Mr Prendergast’s old study. Cedric used it as his office nowadays, but the creaky wooden floor was still the same: excellent. Daisy went over to the French windows that opened onto the corner of the terrace at the back of the House; she opened one of them and left it ajar, so as to let some cold air enter from outside.
Now for a more complicated matter. She climbed on a chair she had set exactly in the middle of the room, reached up for the ceiling and found the light fixture, disengaged the bayonet pins of the bulbs inside and removed them. Then she did the same for the desk lamp and a standing lamp in the corner. She stowed the bulbs away in her handbag. There was a weapons display cabinet against the wall next to the desk. Daisy knew where to find the key in the drawer of the desk, and having retrieved it, she opened the glass doors of the cabinet. She groped among the guns and pistols on display until she found a particular pistol, a Luger. She took it out, extracted the magazine, emptied it into her handbag and inserted another set of bullets; she put the Luger back, but left the glass door ajar, the key still in the lock. Before she left the office, she made sure that the door key was there too, on the inside.
Daisy now went back to the hall and switched on the lights there, then those in the little corridor leading to the office. She did the same with the lights on the stairs and on the landing upstairs. Of course she had no way of knowing that those lights were on, other than toggling each brass switch and hearing it click just once. Finally she was standing in front of Cedric’s bedroom door. She opened it as silently as she could, opened it just wide enough to slip inside without allowing too much light from the landing to enter the room. As expected, Cedric’s quilted silk dressing gown was hanging heavily on a peg on the inside of the door. At this time of the year, with the heating turned down a notch and the open windows letting in some cold air, he would certainly not leave his bedroom without putting it on… Excellent.
Presently Daisy stood for a long while close to Cedric’s bed, listening to the shallow breathing of someone sleeping deeply. She listened carefully, sniffed the air, making sure that there was no one else in the bed: no lady guest sleeping here tonight… “Just his breathing… and mine.” She went over to the window, pulled the curtains aside a bit and opened the window a crack, letting in some cold air from outside. She waited for a while, allowing the temperature in the room to go down just a little “My poor Cedric,” she reflected, “how lonely you are in this big house…”
Now Daisy bent over by the bed and softly touched Cedric’s shoulder. “Wakey-wakey, lazybones, it’s almost three in the morning,” she said softly. She could hear from the way his breathing faltered that Cedric was waking up. Then he mumbled groggily, “What is it? Who’s there?” But before he had the time to clear his mind, Daisy silently stepped away from the bed and slipped out of the room, leaving the door almost closed, so that only a slit of light from the landing shone through.
When a moment later Cedric appeared on the threshold of his room, his eyes blinking in the light, Daisy was just disappearing at the foot of the stairs. Then, when he started walking down, she slipped back into the office at the end of the corridor on the ground floor. Cedric followed the lights and the glimpse he’d caught of a female figure disappearing out of sight. Then he opened the door of his study tentatively, groped for the switch with one hand while still holding on to the door with the other. He heard the clicking of the light switch, but nothing happened: the room remained dark. “Step inside, Cedric!” a voice commanded.
“Daisy! What on earth are you doing here?”
Cedric opened the door wider, and in the light coming from the corridor, he could just make out the outline of a familiar presence sitting in an armchair at the back of the room. Immediately he stepped over to his desk and lifted the receiver from the telephone standing there. “I’m calling the police at once! This is trespassing; you have broken into my house!” But he hardly had the time to find out that the line was dead, before Daisy sprang to the door, closed it, turned the key, and pocketed that. The room was plunged into darkness. “Hey! What’s the idea?”
“Sit down, Cedric! We need to talk…”
“But I don’t want to sit in the dark!”
“Well, for just this once I want to have that advantage over you. Because I may be blind, you understand, but right now I am not sitting in the dark… I want to talk about Ralph’s murder.”
“Oh no, not that again!”
“Yes. You’re going to listen to me. And don’t get any funny ideas in your head… First, this room has a conveniently creaky floor, as you well know, and I can hear every movement you make. Secondly, I have a pistol in my hand. It is taped to my wrist so that if you try to wrestle it from me I can shoot you first; and you know from experience that I can shoot well enough…”
“All right, all right, let’s get on with this charade. What do you want from me?”
“I just want to tell you a story… It goes like this: on V-E Day, in forty-five, when everybody was celebrating in the streets, I decided that it would be a good time to call my old friend Major Mannings at Great Dunmow airbase. When I got him on the phone, I asked him as innocently as I could: who was this Group Captain that came to the base on the very morning after Ralph died? ‘Oh,’ the major answered, ‘that was just Cedric Clifton, Air Vice-Marshal Rupert Clifton’s boy…’ And that’s how I learned the identity of the snooping Group Captain. So you lied when you told me that you flew over from Cairo ‘as soon as you heard the news’. You were already in Britain, and probably in a position to monitor the lists of RAF casualties as soon as they came in at headquarters. You wanted to make sure you could go and recuperate the Thermos that had contained the coffee that you had laced with poison. Only, there were two Thermoses.”
“What are you talking about? All this is just idle speculation! May I remind you that I was the one who got you permission to investigate at the airbase? It was I, remember, who asked Doctor Westmore to take samples… How do you reconcile your accusations with that, eh?”
“It was a tactical move on your part, and it worked brilliantly. I must say I’m impressed by how you kept your cool at Ralph’s funeral… The moment you found out that you had blundered with that Thermos, you decided that it would be better, no matter the consequences, to be seen to help me find the culprit, precisely because it was you.”
“You can’t prove any of this, can you? I just did the decent thing…”
“Well, whatever you say… But the story goes further. On V-E Day I also managed to get hold of the coroner in Saffron Walden, the man who ordered the inquest. Again we talked amiably, and I managed to cajole him into giving me the name of an old school friend of yours at Scotland Yard. This, of course, being the man who had initiated the inquest on your behalf…”
“There you are, I did everything in my power to help…”
“Yes, but the interesting thing, you see, is that both men assured me that they did not receive the pharmacist’s report from you. Of course Chief Inspector Cockett already had it, but you didn’t know that. So it is a bit suspicious, isn’t it, that you didn’t even show it to your friend at the Yard? I remember you saying at the funeral that it would help tremendously if you could show that letter to the authorities concerned…”
“Well, it wasn’t even necessary to show it to old Thistlehurst, he offered his assistance right away, and the result of my efforts proves that I was really trying to help…”
“But I still believe you were only interested in suppressing evidence when you asked me to give you that letter… At any rate, after that, I showed a photograph of the gang to my witness, Ralph’s batman, and he confirmed that you were on it. So then I had a positive identification. It is of course quite tragic that because I’m blind, I have no way of telling how anyone looks. Otherwise I would have known it was you the moment Victor gave me a description of you at first…”
“So that little game you had us play on the last day of your stay, last summer… You in fact already knew what I look like, then?”
“Yes. And you have just implicitly admitted that you are the snooping Group Captain.”
“I did no such thing! I can only deny it and protest my innocence… And you have no real evidence against me anyway… So may I ask if you intend to go on for long with this? I’m starting to find all these explanations very longwinded and tiresome. I’d like to go back to bed…”
“Well that’s tough, because there’s more to come, and you are going to listen patiently like a good boy. Now, the last piece of the puzzle that needed to be solved, of course, was: how on earth did the murderer—whoever he is—manage to administer a lethal dose of arsenic to his victim? It is Victor who found the solution, when I showed him Ralph’s pocket diary. There’s a page with William’s name, and his address at Bletchley Park, and your name and address in Cairo. And Ralph has added: ‘send thank-you note’ When he saw this, Victor suddenly remembered that Ralph had once received by post a packet of very special coffee. There was some Arab script on the label and it was clearly something exclusive and exotic. So, for a couple of weeks, Victor prepared this coffee for his officer to take along on operations, and Ralph never drank anything else until the packet was finished. And by then, of course, he had ingested a deadly dose of arsenic… And in the meantime Ralph probably sent that thank-you note to your address in Cairo, because he knew that it was you who had sent him that delicious coffee from Egypt. Whether you were still there to receive the note or not, I cannot tell. As for your address—and William’s—Ralph must have been in touch with his uncle Rupert, your Dad, and gotten the information from him. And that is the last piece of the puzzle; it fits just so, and completes the picture of your crime…”
“Gosh, Daisy, you know… I was in love with you for many years and it really pains me that you should think I’m capable of such heinous villainy!”
“Well, all I can say is that there’s no doubt whatsoever in my mind that you are. You always had a ruthless and reckless streak, did you not, Cedric? I only need to think back to the episode of the pig that you shot with a dumdum bullet… It makes one shudder and it gives one a horrifying insight into the workings of a mind like yours… And what I really find galling