The Decayed Gentlewoman

by E. X. Ferrars

  “Yes,” Miss Foster-Smith said in her husky whisper, following Colin’s glance about the room. “He had some beautiful things. They were his great interest in life. He used to paint himself and very nicely too, but he was so critical, he was never satisfied, so he almost gave it up. But he went on writing about art. You know his books, I expect.”

  Colin nodded, seeing no need to tell her that he had heard of them for the first time the day before.

  “Miss Foster-Smith, could you tell me a little more about your brother’s accident?” he said. “My aunts were very attached to him. I’d like to be able to tell them what happened.”

  “He was very fond of them too,” she murmured. “I thought at one time… But that’s a long time ago. They stayed good friends. He had a lot of woman friends. They liked him. He was always so loyal and so considerate.”

  “When did the accident happen?” Catching himself whispering, like her, Colin realized that even without death in the air, it would have seemed natural to whisper in that room, in case a word, ringing out too loudly, should shatter something precious.

  “It was Tuesday,” she answered. “A week ago yesterday. I don’t know what happened. Nobody saw it. They just found him, some neighbours, by the letter-box at the end of the road. The dog, poor little Tinker, was killed outright. The police blamed it all on Tinker. They said he must have run out into the road and Willie made a grab to save him and the car swerved and lost control… But they might have stopped, mightn’t they? Wasn’t it a wicked thing to drive straight on?”

  “It was.”

  Colin was thinking of Harriet, sitting alone in the dark with her scratched face, weeping for a friend who had died. Not Greer, but Willie Foster-Smith. Had she tried to telephone to him on Monday and been told the news of his death? Had she rushed round to the Lakes then to accuse them of murder and been hurt and threatened for her pains?

  Miss Foster-Smith was saying, “I don’t really believe it was like that at all, of course. But it’s no use arguing, is it? Besides, all this week I haven’t done much but pray. While there was life there was hope, they told me. So I prayed. It was all I could do. His skull was fractured and there were other injuries. They operated. They said there was hope. Then they said he was better, so I came home and went to sleep. And when I woke up he was dead. If I’d known he was going to die, I wouldn’t have left him.”

  Colin sensed that in a way it felt less grievous to her to explore her own shortcomings than to fix her mind on the sheer emptiness of loss.

  He asked, “What do you mean when you say you don’t believe it happened like that?”

  “Tinker was such a good little dog,” she said. “He was very well trained. Very obedient. When Willie took him out he used to stick at his heels and didn’t go off the pavement unless Willie said he could.”

  “So you don’t think he dashed in front of the car.”

  “I do not. I think some drunken wretch was driving who went up on to the pavement and mowed them both down— Willie and Tinker—as they were quietly walking along. And then he drove on. Drove on and never looked back. God knows, perhaps he didn’t even know what he’d done. Perhaps in the morning he didn’t even remember it.”

  “I think he did,” Colin muttered. “Did you tell the police your idea?”

  “I told the Procurator Fiscal when he came to see me. He said I might be right. He said in any case they’d go on looking for the driver and the car. But I know he thought it was Tinker. What do you think, Mr. Lockie?”

  “I don’t think it was Tinker.”

  By contrast with the desolation in her face the slight change in its expression seemed almost like a smile. “I’m very glad to hear you say that. He was such a good little dog and devoted to Willie, as Willie was to him.”

  Colin stood up. He thanked her for having talked to him and said good-bye. As before, when she had let him in, she tiptoed softly ahead of him to the door and opened and closed it as softly as if she feared to waken a sleeper in the house. Once outside, the feeling of cold at his heart melted in the hot throbbing of anger. He felt sick with it as he strode to the gate. He fumbled with the latch and could not get it open. Then he could not find the car keys in his pocket. Standing beside the car, he cursed in tense, shaking rage.

  Greer was dead now, but there was still Herbert Stringer. There were still the Lakes. And Harriet Winter—only he no longer felt that he knew where he was with Harriet. But if she was involved in this, she need expect no mercy. Everything must be dragged into the open now. And for everything, from the attack on him two years ago to that woman’s grief, those guilty should be made to pay.

  The keys had slipped through a hole in a pocket and secreted themselves cunningly in the lining of his jacket. It took some deftness to extricate them. By the time that he had done it and started the car, his breathing was more normal, but the set of his mouth was still strange as he drove off.

  The house where he had lived for the last year was only ten minutes’ drive away. He started off recklessly, then checked himself and, aware of his tension, drove more slowly than usual. When he stopped the car at the gate, he saw his landlady, Mrs. MacGarvey, sitting at her window. As soon as she saw him she made some excited signs to him, heaved her bulk out of her armchair and vanished.

  Since he had given Ginny his latch-key, he had been intending to ring the bell, but now he waited for Mrs. MacGarvey, to find out what had so wrought her up. Appearing at the door, she came close to him, and although there was no one near to hear her, put her mouth to his ear.

  “There’s a lady upstairs, Doctor,” she breathed into it. “I was in two minds, should I let her in or no. But she said you’d be expecting her.”

  “Yes,” Colin said, “that’s all right, Mrs. MacGarvey.”

  “I said you were away. I said I didn’t know when you’d be back. She said she would wait.”

  “Yes,” he said and tried to pass her.

  But her width took up most of the passage inside.

  “She’s a mind of her own, Doctor,” she said. “I’d not have let her in if she’d given me time to think. I wouldn’t let anyone into your room without instructions. But she was right sharp with me and up the stairs before I knew what she was doing.”

  “It’s quite all right, Mrs. MacGarvey,” he said. “I asked her to come here.”

  “And then this came for you.” She picked up a folded note that had been lying on the hall table. “Pushed in at the letterbox. I happened not to be in my room, so I didn’t see who brought it.”

  Colin glanced at it, saw that it was addressed to him in a writing that he did not know, thrust it into a pocket, managed at last to edge round Mrs. MacGarvey and went running up the stairs.

  There were lights on the stairs and landings, but none in his room. There was only the red oblong of the gas fire. That for a moment made it possible for him to think that it was Ginny whose head and shoulders he saw, outlined in the dusk against the window. Then a movement of the shoulders, too rigid for Ginny, and a gleam on jewelled spectacles warned him.

  Switching on the light, he said, “It isn’t here, Mrs. Lake. But I suppose you’ve found that out already.”

  * * *

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  « ^ »

  Beryl Lake did not move except to take off her spectacles and spin them idly round by one of the ear-pieces. Without them her shortsightedness very slightly softened the intentness of her gaze, but her eyes still had a pebbly hardness. She was wearing a lilac tweed overcoat with a narrow mink collar and some heavy silver ear-rings.

  “I didn’t think it would be here,” she said. “I came to talk to you.”

  Trying to mask the sick anxiety he felt, not because Beryl was here, but because Ginny wasn’t, Colin shut the door behind him.

  “Did you tell my landlady I was expecting you?” he asked.

  “Weren’t you?” she said.

  “Sometime, I suppose. You or one of the others.”

  “Wha
t others?”

  “Your husband or Stringer. I may as well tell you, Mrs. Lake, I believe I’ve sorted out most of the plot. There won’t be much point in our talking if you don’t face that.”

  “So Ginny told you?”

  “Ginny?”

  She did not answer, but only gave him a mock-gentle smile as she spun the flashing spectacles round and round.

  “Where is she now?” he asked. “What have you done with her?”

  “I haven’t seen her,” Beryl said. “Not for days.”

  “But she was coming here…

  Suddenly Colin remembered the note in his pocket, pulled it out, and opened it up.

  Beryl went on, “You’d probably find a drink as welcome as I should. Haven’t you something on the premises?”

  Colin was reading:

  Darling Colin—I know you don’t like that word, but it’s derived from the Saxon deórling, which surely gives it a respectable ancestry and even then it meant dearly beloved— I looked this up in a dictionary at Ardachoil while you were out walking with Aunt Clara—you do see, don’t you, that the best thing is for me to go straight back? Otherwise you’ll only get pulled deeper and deeper in and you needn’t pretend to me you’re going to like it. It’s sure to do you harm too in your sort of job, if it hasn’t already. I can probably cope with everything if you’ll just stay away. I mean this, Colin deórling. Apart from all this, I’d have liked to stay—you don’t know how much. But I’m going to push this in at your letterbox and make for the station. The taxi-driver says there’s a good train to London at four. I think I can just make it. With all my love—if it’s any good to you—Virginia.

  It was an almost unreadable scrawl that must have been written hurriedly in the jolting taxi. As Colin finished it, he could think only of one thing and that was that all this time Ginny had been wanting to be called Virginia. Not a useful thing to start thinking about with Beryl Lake sitting there, her sharp gaze pinned to his face.

  He folded the note and put it back in his pocket.

  “A drink—there may be something,” he said vaguely.

  Nobody that he could remember had ever called Ginny Virginia. So her use of the name now felt like the offer of something that she did not give to other people. But the wretched girl must be halfway to Newcastle by now and that wasn’t going to help in the least.

  Opening a cupboard, he brought out the bottle of whisky that had been there since Christmas and was still half full.

  He poured some into two glasses, gave one to Beryl and with the other went to stand in front of the gas fire.

  “I’ve just been to see Miss Foster-Smith,” he observed.

  Beryl drank avidly.

  “Foster-Smith—that seems to ring a bell,” she said.

  “You surprise me!” He put his glass down after only just putting it to his lips. He found that he could not face the idea of drinking with Beryl.

  “I’ve a feeling I’m going to surprise you still more shortly,” she said. “I’m afraid you’re a rather simple young man.”

  “I don’t doubt it,” he answered.

  “What about this Miss Foster-Smith?”

  “She was grieving for her murdered brother. Odd thing to do, I expect you think—but there you are, it’s the sort of woman she is.”

  “Would you mind explaining what you’re talking about?” she said.

  “Yes, I do mind explaining what you already know.”

  She looked at him thoughtfully. “I suppose if I said I don’t know, you wouldn’t believe me.”

  “No,” he said.

  “All the same, the only murder I’ve heard of recently was down our way. The murder of Mr. Greer, in whom you were taking such an interest a few days ago. You’ve heard of it, I imagine.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know the police are looking for a tall man with a Scots accent?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you mean to go to them?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “I don’t see why you should,” she said. “You had nothing to do with it.”

  “But I may be able to help them with their inquiries. I’ve begun to look forward to doing that.”

  She searched his face for a moment, then with an odd little smile, said, “If that’s true, Mr. Lockie, I’ve been mistaken about you and I may as well go home again. I’d hoped we were going to be able to come to some arrangement.”

  “After two murders?”

  “Two—?” She said it as if she thought that she had not heard him correctly.

  Colin found it an effort to keep his voice from shaking. “Damn it, I don’t care what you did to Greer! But to kill poor Willie Foster-Smith and his poor damned little dog! To mow them down in cold blood, almost as you did me when you first grabbed the picture, only this time meaning to kill!”

  “I did these things?” she said in amazement. “I’m going around murdering people?”

  “It may have been Greer or Stringer, but you knew all about it. Listen, Mrs. Lake—” Colin’s anger was beginning to get out of control, which scared him when he became aware of it. He started to walk up and down the room, keeping his clenched fists in his pockets. “Whatever good you think you can do here, it won’t help you not to recognize how much I know. I know Willie Foster-Smith spotted the picture at Ardachoil for what it was. I know he told Mrs. Winter about it. I know she told Greer—or perhaps she told you and your husband and you told Greer. I know Greer went to Ardachoil, broke into the house and had a look at the picture, decided Foster-Smith was right about it, found out when I was going to take it to Edinburgh, held me up and stole it. After that he kept it out of sight for a couple of years, waiting till it had had a chance to be forgotten and till you had a houseful of stuff like Mrs. Sibbald’s to sell. You slipped it inconspicuously in among the junk then and put it up for auction. But before that—” Colin had come to a standstill in front of the gas fire again. “Before that Foster-Smith had to be killed. If the picture had ever come up for sale at Sotheby’s, he’d have recognized it and if he’d ever found out that Greer had bought it in a saleroom next to Mrs. Winter’s café, he could hardly have let it pass without starting a full-scale investigation. And that would have spoiled all the carefully worked-out market overt set-up.” Without disputing anything that he had said, Beryl remarked in a cool, sharp voice, “It’s interesting that you still don’t seem to know what the picture is.”

  “I don’t,” he said.

  “It’s a Rubens.”

  “A—?”

  “Oh yes,” she said, almost casually. “Your friend Foster-Smith had his suspicions years ago and set about tracking down the history of the painting. It’s the portrait of a woman called Arabella Hamilton, whom Rubens painted when he came to the court of Charles I in 1629 for an eight-months’ visit. He did a number of portraits during that time—Foster-Smith, of course, knew that and he dug up a lot of information about the Hamilton family which made him sure he was on the right track. For your information, it’s probably worth around thirty thousand pounds or more.”

  “In the open market?”

  She smiled sardonically. “Naturally. Well, Mr. Lockie?”

  “What do you mean—well?”

  “I was just wondering if you mightn’t feel a little tempted. To co-operate, I mean, without letting your relatives know too much about it. However, I can see it was a stupid idea.”

  “It strikes me as rather stupid too to call it a Rubens,” Colin said. “It’s not in the least like one.”

  “Because you expect a Rubens to be all great slabs of pink flesh? You’re quite wrong. Rich and wonderful, yes, and you’ll find out Arabella turns out a lot richer, a lot more wonderful than you expect when she’s been cleaned up. Oh yes, indeed. But if you doubt me, I can probably find the letter Foster-Smith wrote to Harriet that gave all the details of his research. Greer was satisfied, anyway, and he was quite an expert.” With a quick little movement she put her spectacles on again, as if to make a
specially careful study of the effect on Colin of what she was going to say next. “I’m talking about the letter, Mr. Lockie, that Ginny brought to us.”

  Colin said nothing. He knew that for the moment it was the only thing to do. He had to keep his teeth together and the tumult inside him to himself.

  Beryl drank some more whisky, laughed, and said, “And I was fully expecting to have my head bitten off! I keep being wrong about you.”

  “Go on!” he managed to say.

  “You’re sure you want me to?”

  “Go on!”

  “About the letter? Well, you don’t suppose Harriet had the brains to see the possibilities, do you? She’s far too ignorant and feeble-minded. But Ginny’s shrewd, well educated, well informed. She may not have let you notice that. She tends not to. Poor little lost soul, Ginny—that’s the picture of herself she likes people to have. In fact she got a good degree at Bristol, I think it was, and teaches English in some quite classy girls’ school. But she’d like to do better for herself. She’s told me she feels the life cramps her style. And when Ginny wants a thing, she goes after it.”

  Ginny’s note crackled in Colin’s pocket as he crushed it in his hand.

  “Well?” he said.

  “Haven’t I told you enough? Have I got to tell you all the miserable details?”

  “You seem to be trying to tell me Ginny was in on the whole thing.”

  “From the very beginning.”

  “Then why did she wreck it by getting in touch with me?”

  “Because Greer blundered.”

  “How?”

  “By trying to edge her out of the big deal. He argued she’d done none of the planning and taken none of the risks. If things went wrong, she wouldn’t even be involved. So she ought to be satisfied, he said, with two or three hundred pounds at most and if she didn’t like it, he’d let Stringer loose on her. I told him he was making a mistake. I told him she’d be very angry and she wouldn’t intimidate easily. She wasn’t a soft dollop of dough like Harriet that you could kick around without her ever trying to get back at you. But he was never very good with women. He never understood what made them tick. He didn’t see that a couple of hundred was almost worse than nothing to Ginny—an insult, really.”