The Yellow Room Conspiracy Read online

  Bobo had never looked a natural athlete, effective rather than deft, and was a large man now, but he was still keeping himself in trim. Holding my breath and counting the seconds I watched from the door as he walked calmly into the room. By five he had reached the chair. He took Gerry by both wrists, heaved him into a sitting position, half knelt and dragged the body over his shoulders. Gerry was in his shirt-sleeves, with gaudy Eton Rambler braces. I glimpsed his face, a dark yellowish purple. Eleven. Bobo stayed kneeling, adjusting his hold. Fourteen, fifteen. He rose, shrugged his load into position and strode out and straight to the window. Twenty-two. I joined him. Edward Voss-Thompson was out on East Lawn under a golf-umbrella, wearing a dressing-gown.

  “Want any help?” he called.

  “Not yet,” I answered. “Stay where you are. Send for an ambulance.”

  “Right,” said Bobo. “Your turn.”

  I held my breath and walked back into the Yellow Room. Five and I’d reached the gas-tap and turned it off. Plenty of time. I stood and looked around. Gerry’s smoking-jacket lay across the desk, beside a brandy bottle and a half-empty water-jug. There was a balloon glass on the table beside the armchair where he had been slumped. An upright chair stood close in front of the fire itself, facing the room. Fifteen. As I picked it up to carry it over to the window my fingers went straight through the cloth at the back. Ridiculously, I paused to see why, and found that the whole area was scorched. The padded front, on the other hand, was for some reason damp. I actually stood there, staring at the object as if it mattered, before carrying it on to the window and climbing on to the seat. The window-catch, out of sight above my head, was of an unfamiliar pattern with some kind of locking-device. Obstinate, I fiddled with it, realised I had lost count, came to my senses and dashed for the door. My haste, verging on panic, caused me to catch my foot on the bench which Bobo had used to prop one leaf open, and I went sprawling, with the hoarded breath bursting from my lungs. Nothing could stop me gasping a breath of the poisonous mixture, but I forced it out again, crawled blindly for the window and hauled myself up. This time, though, I deliberately stood to one side, invisible from below, while I gulped the sweet inflowing draught. The bench had made my mind up.

  I truly believe that since that first whiff of gas outside the Gun Room I had sensed, guessed, known, that something more complex and more potentially disastrous to us all than an accident, or even a suicide, was in process. Perhaps some such awareness had been in my mind ever since Nancy’s ominous remark on the telephone: “It’s going to happen. Or else …” The sisters at their net on the lawn, Nancy at the window, Mr Chad on his ladder; the locked doors; Nancy up and dressed and apparently waiting for my alarm, Harriet ready for it too, Bobo knowing so clearly what was involved, bringing the bench; the water-jug, the chair both scorched and wet … I also knew that such intricacies invariably come apart under the pressure of the real world. Every section of the machinery carries the possibility of betrayal. It was never going to work. It must be covered up. Buried.

  I knew what I wanted to do, but not how. Bobo would be back any moment. All I could think of, no doubt from forgotten boyhood reading, was oily rags. Bonfires. The Gun Room. I left the window and dashed downstairs.

  Matches and paraffin were there, but no cloth. I opened the can, wadded a handkerchief over it and tilted. A missile. There was a waste-paper basket full of old cricket balls. I took one and ran back up the stairs, knotting the sodden handkerchief round the ball as I went. I remember hearing footsteps along the passage below, Lucy’s voice calling my name. No more.

  LUCY X

  August 1956

  The first I knew was the fire alarm—I think I’ve said that. There were feet stamping about, and voices, and it was dreadfully early, and I wanted to put the pillow over my head and go back to sleep, but then Nan rushed in and hoicked the bedclothes off and yelled that the East Wing was full of gas and we’d all got to get out, so I pulled some clothes on and went down and out through the double Saloon doors on the South Front, where luckily there was always a stand full of brollies, so I took one and stumped crossly round in the pouring rain to the East Lawn to see what was happening. Teddy Voss-Thompson was there, shooing everyone up to the stables, but he told me Paul and Bobo were up in King William’s Room trying to get Gerry out, and a moment later Bobo came staggering out of the East Door with a body over his shoulder. I ran to help.

  “Don’t look,” he said, but I’d seen already. It was Gerry. I knew he was dead. That colour.

  Bobo laid him down. I took off my coat and covered his face and then ran into the house. I was desperately worried about Paul. After last night, and then creeping round fully dressed when everyone else was in bed, I thought he might do anything. As I turned into the East Corridor I just glimpsed him running up the stairs. I called his name. Bobo was a bit behind me, so I don’t think he’d seen Paul. He was telling me to come back. He caught me up and held me by the elbow but I jerked it away and said, oh, I don’t know what, and he gave in, so we started up the stairs together.

  We hadn’t quite reached the landing when there was a colossal explosion and a great whoosh of burning air and we were knocked flat. They told me afterwards that if we’d been anywhere except on the stairs we’d have been killed. Paul too. He must have been just below the top, because the explosion knocked him all the way back down to the landing. I didn’t see or hear him fall but we found him there, with his clothes on fire, when Bobo grabbed me by the shoulder and started to drag me up towards the window, which was open.

  Bobo was absolutely terrific. I’ll never hear a word against him since then. Quick as a flash he let go of me and simply rolled Paul up in the landing carpet, banging the flames out with his bare hands as he did so, then he picked Paul up and carried him to the window, sat and swung his own legs over, and jumped.

  I rushed to the window too and climbed out. I could see Paul and Bobo lying in the laurels beneath me. It wasn’t far, really, not a whole storey anyway because of the landing, but I still couldn’t make myself jump, though the house was like a furnace behind me. I climbed out and hung from the sill but I still couldn’t let go, and then Mr Chad arrived with his ladder and got me down.

  I was perfectly alright, hardly a scratch, just my hair a bit singed, but Bobo had broken both ankles it turned out, in spite of the soft ground under the laurels. We got them out. I can’t remember who else was there, but Mr Chad kept shouting at everyone that we’d got to get well clear because the equaliser tank hadn’t gone up yet. He and Teddy were carrying Paul, still rolled in the carpet, and I was trying to keep the rain off Paul with a brolly, when I remembered about Gerry and looked back over my shoulder. So I actually saw the next explosion.

  It was like films of the Blitz, though I don’t think I’ve ever seen a film of a big bomb actually hitting a house, but I’m sure that’s what it would be like. Before I heard the noise or anything I saw the East Front sort of shrug, and then came the roar and the wall of hot air whumped over us and the house was breaking up, floating apart, huge blocks of brickwork and stone sailing through the air and the ball of boiling fire mushrooming up beneath them. Mr Chad staggered against me but we didn’t quite fall, and then we started to run best we could carrying Paul, while the bits of house came crashing down through the trees around us.

  We all got up to the stables somehow. Somebody must have helped Bobo, I didn’t see who. No one else was hurt, though a lot of Mother’s windows had been blown in by the blast and I could hear the horses screaming in their stalls and thrashing around as they tried to escape. Mother’s flat was all on the ground floor, so we carried Paul into her bedroom. One side of his face was ghastly to see and his right sleeve had really caught fire, so I told them to bring me scissors and a lot of cold water and towels and I bathed and bathed the burnt bits, the way Nanny always said you had to, though the doctors then said grease was better, but now they say water after all. It was when I w
as cutting the burnt sleeve away that I smelt the paraffin. I’ve made too many bonfires not to know what it was. That’s how I knew he’d started the fire.

  It didn’t make any difference. It was all over, done, and a lot of it was my fault. All I knew was that I wanted to do the best for him I could. When the ambulances came I insisted on staying with him. They didn’t want me to, but I told them who I was and people still used to pay attention to that sort of thing then.

  The ambulance didn’t have proper windows, just a couple of titchy little panes in the back doors, but as we swung round into the drive I got a glimpse of what had happened to the house. The whole of the East Wing was gone, and a lot of the centre block. You could see right into the rooms beyond, the wall-paper and the fireplaces and a bath hanging in mid air, like you used to on bombed sites during the war. The East Front had collapsed outwards on to the porte-cochère. There was just a pile of rubble there. Gerry was underneath it.

  PAUL XI

  Autumn 1956

  I woke in considerable pain. The whole side of my face, as well as my right arm, was burning and throbbing. My right eyelid seemed to be glued shut, and when I opened my left I could see nothing. From the sense of touch in that cheek, just discernible against the steady pain on the other side, I was aware of a dressing of some kind over my face. I moved my left hand to feel the place, but fingers caught my wrist and restrained me. Lucy’s voice said, “Try and lie still. I’ll send for someone. Are you terribly sore?”

  My lips wouldn’t articulate. I was forced to groan an affirmative.

  “You’re in hospital,” said Lucy. “Try to lie still. You’ll be all right. Everyone’s all right. We all got out.”

  Somebody came and gave me an injection, morphine presumably, and the pain died and I slept. The pattern was repeated again and again. Sometimes Lucy wasn’t there, but more often she was. When my hurts became more bearable and the pain-killers could be reduced enough for me to feel no more than drowsy, she read to me, and all through the six-month process of healing and having my face re-built she was with me, most hours of most days. As soon as I was well enough to pay any attention to my business, she made herself my channel for all my dealings. I had known from her rare references to her wartime work that she must be competent enough at that sort of thing, but had no idea how quick, clear and sensible she was, knowing exactly when to act on her own responsibility, and so on. My affairs, which I had left in a state of controlled tension, were by now in crisis. I just managed to restore them to decent order. There was luck involved, as always, but I know I could not have done it without Lucy’s help. And I doubt if I would have healed as well as I did, or found the energy for my work, or regained my belief that there was any point in working or living, without her company. But at no point did I ask or say anything that might in any way open up a discussion of the events around Gerry’s death. It was a subject far too dangerous to talk about, to think about, to remember in any way at all.

  I had one relapse. It came while I was in another hospital, undergoing the drearily painful business of having my face rebuilt by skin-grafts from my buttocks. Lucy was there as much as possible. She will say that she was using the need to visit me as a way of escaping from the reverberations of the so-called Seddon Affair, then in full swing, but all that mattered to me was that she came. In the course of one visit she happened to mention that Nancy was going to be “all right” financially, because on her marriage Gerry had taken out a large insurance policy on his own life. That night for the only time I rejected a graft. I never made the connection that this news had provided me with the one missing piece of machinery for the dream-structure I had been building, starting from that first flash of intuition as I lay sprawled on the floor of King William’s Room gasping the poisonous air and continuing as I came and went through the morphine haze, but never acknowledged by my waking consciousness. I now “knew” the motive for Gerry’s murder.

  I was too ill to attend the inquest, so gave an affidavit in which I described my talk with Gerry, saying that he had seemed depressed but not overwhelmed about his finances, but omitting of course his apparent attempt to blackmail me with threats about what Michael might do to Lucy. I said that I had fallen ill during the conversation, gone back to the house and gone to bed; that I had decided to leave early next morning for personal reasons and had telephoned for a taxi; that on reaching the Gun Room I had smelt gas, woken the household, returned with Bobo and helped him break into the Yellow Room, watched him retrieve Gerry’s body, and then gone into the room myself and turned off the gas; that my intention had been to open a window, but that I could not remember doing so—indeed could remember nothing else at all until I woke in hospital. Apart from the omission referred to I was not lying. That indeed was all I remembered. It was only the shock of Lucy’s question in the garden last July that allowed me the glimpse of memory that prompted my reply to her.

  Instantly the door tried to close, but I knew I must not let it. Lucy is dying. There is unfinished business between us. The urgency with which I have felt compelled to write this memoir tells me that the time has come. The memoir itself is a tool for prying out into the open this thing that I have refused to look at or think about for thirty-six years, and now that I have it in plain view, what have I got?

  There is a story in, I think, Oliver Wendell Holmes about how in the dentist’s chair, under the influence of laughing gas, he saw with great clarity the secret of the universe, but on coming round from the anaesthetic could no longer remember it. He insisted on being given the gas again, saw the secret again and this time, with great effort, clutched it to him as he swam back up into consciousness. It turned out to be this:

  Hoggamus Higgamus,

  Men are polygamous,

  Higgamus Hoggamus,

  Women monogamous.

  What I have discovered after all my effort appears to be a secret of that order. The intuition on which I acted so disastrously came to me in two parts, like the piers of a bridge, with a vague-seen structure in between. First, that everybody in the house, to judge by their reactions when I panted the news of the gas leak to them, already knew what to do. Dressed as I was, and after my breakdown the previous night, Nancy would have had every excuse for taking me for crazy when I confronted her, but she did not. Scenes like those which then took place—Nancy trying the door on the spiral stair and then setting about evacuating the house, Bobo taking the bench on his way up to the Yellow Room, to use it as a ram—had already been mentally rehearsed. My intervention was if anything a convenience, providing an uninvolved witness to the events.

  Second, the episode on the East Lawn the previous evening had indeed been a charade. Lucy had struck the ball towards the house on purpose. She could not hope to hit one of the Yellow Room windows at that distance, but that didn’t matter because Mr Chad, the intended witness, had his back to the scene, and Nancy, watching her moment, broke the pane from inside, threw up the window and tossed out a cricket ball she had ready. Even I, watching the flight of the ball as it started, had assumed that I’d been mistaken in its line, so obviously did the tinkle of glass attach itself to the missile. The sisters, of course, had not intended that I should be watching. Nancy had pointed me out, no doubt in some alarm, and Lucy had immediately come over to check whether I had noticed anything wrong.

  The rest of the structure, which, as I say, I put together in no better than a half-waking state, and then dopey with morphine, can be summarised as follows:- If Gerry failed to come to acceptable terms with Michael, Nancy decided that she would be better off getting rid of him and taking the insurance. She was the instigator, and the perpetrator. Her sisters, acting out of that intense family solidarity I had sensed when I saw them on the lawn, had been more or less active accessories. The intention was that Gerry’s death should look like an accident. The fire must seem to have been on, and then the gas failed while Gerry was in his stupor, and then to have come on aga
in but not relit, thus filling the room with gas. There must be a reason for the fire to have been on on a summer evening. The doors must be locked, so that nobody in the house could be suspected of being involved. Another way into the room must be arranged for.

  All this Nancy achieved. The only element outside her control was Gerry’s actually drinking himself into a stupor, but she saw to it in her interview with him before supper that he would have every incentive to do so if he failed to break with Michael. At the same time she prepared events by spilling water over one of the chairs and putting it in front of the fire to dry. Presumably she listened outside the door while the interview with Michael took place, and failed. Perhaps Gerry then locked himself in, perhaps not—it didn’t matter. If not she could have gone in and upbraided him, perhaps even incited him to drink by doing so herself, and meanwhile checked on her other arrangements. If he did, then she would have left and waited until the household was asleep, fetched Mr Chad’s ladder, removed the soft putty from the pane she had broken that afternoon, turned off the gas (to judge by the charring of the chair and Gerry being in shirt-sleeves he had not done so), waited for the elements to cool and turned it on again, if necessary locked and bolted the doors and then left, re-puttying the pane into place. She was, I gather, skilled enough to do so. She would have brought a flashlight to work by. She then went back to her room and waited for the earliest moment at which it would seem proper to wake the household. She had been on her way to do so when I had knocked on her door. There were other apparently corroborating details—Bobo’s participation, for instance, could be accounted for by my awareness that Gerry had asked him for money, as he had attempted to ask me, and perhaps also with the threat of some piece of knowledge Bobo would much rather not have made public—but it would be tedious to go on.