Widow's Web
had learned of Martin’s illness: Dr. William L. Davies. People sometimes kept in touch with their doctors, for one reason or another, even after they had moved away. Torrant left the library files and went in search of a phone book.Dr. Davies, sixtyish with a tailored brown face and a sophisticated minimum of snow-white hair, apologized brusquely for making Torrant wait. Torrant explained himself and his errand, and Davies shook his head. He hadn’t heard from Mrs. Fennister since the inquest; he knew the house had been sold but he had no idea where she had moved. Very sad case, said Davies, already beginning to interest himself in various papers on his desk; very sad.
Torrant was acutely aware that he himself was sitting where Martin had sat, hearing the diagnosis he couldn’t face. He said persistently, “The newspapers used a medical phrase, mostly Latin. What exactly was the matter with Martin Fennister?” and the brown face swung up again, startled.
Davies seemed to hesitate. Then he said half to himself, “All a matter of public record . . . Mr. Fennister was suffering from a disease of the liver, hard to spot in the early stages and therefore somewhat—”
“How long,” Torrant interrupted him in a voice that sounded shockingly bald in this well-carpeted office, “before it would have killed him?”
“It wouldn’t have killed him,” said Davies.
Torrant stared in complete silence. Davies said, “It called for an operation—not too complex, as it happens—and three or four weeks of bed rest at home. That’s all. The unfortunate part is that now and then a patient—like Mr. Fennister— starts looking up terms in a dictionary, takes to brooding until he thinks himself into a hopeless state. In his particular case, of course—” The voice went smoothly on.
And Torrant very nearly missed it, the thing that undid all the logic and wiped out the resignation.
He had risen, he was on his way to the door because suddenly he hated this and, close as he had been to Martin, it seemed unpleasantly like prying. Davies’ voice followed him, saying, . . understandable after Mrs. Fennister filled in the background for me. About his father. It leaves a frightful mark on a child, seeing someone he loves drag through a long and painful illness . .
Partly because of his thunderclap reaction, Torrant was able to leave without laughing in the brown and faintly pompous face, without shouting that Martin Fennister’s father had died peacefully and obliviously of a heart attack on the eighteenth hole.
CHAPTER 2
WHAT HAD HE FOUND OUT?
Torrant walked mechanically back through the snowy streets, sorting out facts and looking at them singly, trying not to add them up too soon.
Annabelle Blair—his mind went on calling her that, refusing her Martin’s name—had told two flat and astonishing lies. John Fennister’s death had been an instant and not a lingering thing, and Martin, the “child” of Dr. Davies’ commiserating tones, had been twenty-six at the time.
She had volunteered these lies in a private visit to the doctor’s office after he had told Martin his verdict. Filling in the background, Davies had called it—but filling it in with deliberate falsity. Because certainly telling a man’s doctor that his father had died of the same disease before him, when he had not, was something more than a slip of the tongue.
Unless Annabelle Blair were a pathological liar, she had done this with a purpose of her own in mind. Torrant pulled his mind grimly away from conjecture and looked at the other side of the shield.
Martin had been informed by Davies that he was suffering from a rare disease of the liver, that he would have to undergo surgery and a definite period of convalescence before it could be cured. The monster in Martin’s mind was a fear of something that could not be cured; he would never have killed himself rather than face an operation and a month’s enforced rest.
But he had.
Torrant lay stretched on his bed, staring at the ceiling and trying to match up his bleak little facts. It was, he thought, like trying to put together something you had dropped, that out of what had looked like two clean pieces there was a sliver missing.
What was the sliver?
‘Background,’ Davies said in another echo. Background, in one sense, was used to set a scene, create a mood, provide a convincing frame for actions to take place within it. Had Annabelle Blair used it in that sense? Had she then . . .
Torrant got up off the bed abruptly, because all at once he wanted to be moving, to shake off the dark irrational thing he had glimpsed in Davies’ office. It wouldn’t be shaken off; by wondering, he had invited it into his own mind, and it grew.
The two significant lies which Annabelle Blair had told Martin’s doctor were pointless unless she had lied to Martin too. To give her private visit any purpose at all, she would have to have returned home to tell Martin that Davies had kept the truth from him, that the operation was only a gesture and there was really no hope of a cure. Then, because Martin would have been fighting for his life without knowing it, she would have had to begin dropping hints about his probable future, the tiny seeds that would flower up so blackly in Martin’s mind.
And when Martin finally killed himself, the scene would already have been set, the mood created. His doctor would shake his head ruefully at the routine investigation, and talk about the effect of a suffering parent on an impressionable child . . .
Told to anybody else, it would have been the wildest kind of conjecture. Inside Torrant’s own brain, it was no longer a flashing thought or a slow deliberate marshalling of logic. It was a solid and sickening truth, or so close to the truth that the mechanics didn’t matter. Martin’s wife had brought about his death because she wanted it, by turning his