She seized her hair again and tugged it violently.
‘Don’t,’ I cried. ‘You’ll have it out by the roots.’
‘Nonsense,’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘Hair’s tough. Though when I had measles at fourteen with a very high temperature, it did come out—all round the front. Most shaming. And it was six whole months before it grew properly again. Awful for a girl—girls mind so. I thought of it yesterday when I was visiting Mary Delafontaine in that nursing home. Her hair was coming out just like mine did. She said she’d have to get a false front when she was better. If you’re sixty it doesn’t always grow again, I believe.’
‘I saw a girl pull out another girl’s hair by the roots the other night,’ I said. I was conscious of a slight note of pride in my voice as one who has seen life.
‘What extraordinary places have you been going to?’ asked Mrs Oliver.
‘This was in a coffee bar in Chelsea.’
‘Oh Chelsea!’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘Everything happens there, I believe. Beatniks and sputniks and squares and the beat generation. I don’t write about them much because I’m so afraid of getting the terms wrong. It’s safer, I think, to stick to what you know.’
‘Such as?’
‘People on cruises, and in hotels, and what goes on in hospitals, and on parish councils—and sales of work—and music festivals, and girls in shops, and committees and daily women, and young men and girls who hike round the world in the interests of science, and shop assistants—’
She paused, out of breath.
‘That seems fairly comprehensive to be getting on with,’ I said.
‘All the same, you might take me out to a coffee bar in Chelsea some time—just to widen my experience,’ said Mrs Oliver wistfully.
‘Any time you say. Tonight?’
‘Not tonight. I’m too busy writing or rather worrying because I can’t write. That’s really the most tiresome thing about writing—though everything is tiresome really, except the one moment when you get what you think is going to be a wonderful idea, and can hardly wait to begin. Tell me, Mark, do you think it is possible to kill someone by remote control?’
‘What do you mean by remote control? Press a button and set off a radioactive death ray?’
‘No, no, not science fiction. I suppose,’ she paused doubtfully, ‘I really mean black magic.’
‘Wax figures and pins in them?’
‘Oh, wax figures are right out,’ said Mrs Oliver scornfully. ‘But queer things do happen—in Africa or the West Indies. People are always telling you so. How natives just curl up and die. Voodoo—or ju-ju … Anyway, you know what I mean.’
I said that much of that was attributed nowadays to the power of suggestion. Word is always conveyed to the victim that his death has been decreed by the medicine-man—and his subconscious does the rest.
Mrs Oliver snorted.
‘If anyone hinted to me that I had been doomed to lie down and die, I’d take a pleasure in thwarting their expectations!’
I laughed.
‘You’ve got centuries of good Occidental sceptical blood in your veins. No predispositions.’
‘Then you think it can happen?’
‘I don’t know enough about the subject to judge. What put it into your head? Is your new masterpiece to be Murder by Suggestion?’
‘No, indeed. Good old-fashioned rat poison or arsenic is good enough for me. Or the reliable blunt instrument. Not firearms if possible. Firearms are so tricky. But you didn’t come here to talk to me about my books.’
‘Frankly no—The fact is that my cousin Rhoda Despard has got a church fête and—’
‘Never again!’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘You know what happened last time? I arranged a Murder Hunt, and the first thing that happened was a real corpse. I’ve never quite got over it!’
‘It’s not a Murder Hunt. All you’d have to do would be to sit in a tent and sign your own books—at five bob a time.’
‘We-e-l-l-l,’ said Mrs Oliver doubtfully. ‘That might be all right. I shouldn’t have to open the fête? Or say silly things? Or have to wear a hat?’
None of these things, I assured her, would be required of her.
‘And it would only be for an hour or two,’ I said coaxingly. ‘After that, there’ll be a cricket match—no, I suppose not this time of year. Children dancing, perhaps. Or a fancy dress competition—’
Mrs Oliver interrupted me with a wild scream.
‘That’s it,’ she cried. ‘A cricket ball! Of course! He sees it from the window … rising up in the air … and it distracts him—and so he never mentions the cockatoo! What a good thing you came, Mark. You’ve been wonderful.’
‘I don’t quite see—’
‘Perhaps not, but I do,’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘It’s all rather complicated, and I don’t want to waste time explaining. Nice as it’s been to see you, what I’d really like you to do now is to go away. At once.’
‘Certainly. About the fête—’
‘I’ll think about it. Don’t worry me now. Now where on earth did I put my spectacles? Really, the way things just disappear …’
Mrs Gerahty opened the door of the presbytery in her usual sharp pouncing style. It was less like answering a bell, than a triumphant manoeuvre expressing the sentiment ‘I’ve caught you this time!’
‘Well now, and what would you be wanting?’ she demanded belligerently.
There was a boy on the doorstep, a very negligible looking boy—a boy not easily noticeable nor easily remembered—a boy like a lot of other boys. He sniffed because he had a cold in his head.
‘Is this the priest’s place?’
‘Is it Father Gorman you’re wanting?’
‘He’s wanted,’ said the boy.
‘Who wants him and where and what for?’
‘Benthall Street. Twenty-three. Woman as says she’s dying. Mrs Coppins sent me. This is a Carthlick place all right, isn’t it? Woman says the vicar won’t do.’
Mrs Gerahty reassured him on this essential point, told him to stop where he was and retired into the presbytery. Some three minutes later a tall elderly priest came out carrying a small leather case in his hand.
‘I’m Father Gorman,’ he said. ‘Benthall Street? That’s round by the railway yards, isn’t it?’
‘’Sright. Not more than a step, it isn’t.’
They set out together, the priest walking with a free striding step.
‘Mrs—Coppins, did you say? Is that the name?’
‘She’s the one what owns the house. Lets rooms, she does. It’s one of the lodgers wants you. Name of Davis, I think.’
‘Davis. I wonder now. I don’t remember—’
‘She’s one of you all right. Carthlick, I mean. Said as no vicar would do.’
The