“Now give them to Joe,” Stringer said, “then get back where you were.”
Ginny put the block and the pen on the table in front of Joe, then went back to stand beside Harriet.
“Get writing, Joe,” Stringer said. “Go on. You can start, ‘I never meant to kill anyone…’ ”
Joe’s fingers fumbled for the pen, picked it up, dropped it, picked it up again.
“I won’t say I stole those things,” he said in a thick voice, as if he were talking in his sleep. “I’ll confess to the murder. I won’t say I stole.”
“All right, it won’t make any difference,” Stringer said. “They’ll find the things in your house and draw their own deductions.”
“I didn’t steal,” Joe said. “That’s how I’ll begin. I’ll say, ‘I have never in my life stooped—’ ”
There was a wild scream from Harriet, “Don’t, don’t, don’t, Joe! Don’t you see, when you’ve done it, he’ll kill us all and say you did it?”
For an instant Stringer was startled. His hand wavered. At the same moment Colin and Joe hurled themselves across the room at him. The noise of the gun was shatteringly loud in the room and one other scream was added to those that poured uncontrollably from Harriet’s stretched throat.
Then Joe began to topple to the ground. It seemed to happen very slowly. His face was empty and blood was spurting over his shirt and his cream satin tie with the hounds racing over it and his tartan waistcoat. But Stringer was on the ground too, with Colin on top of him. This time Stringer was as unconscious as Colin had only thought he was at their first meeting.
Ginny had pulled the window open and was shouting for help. In a moment feet came pounding along the pavements and the sleeping square came to life, a crowd mysteriously materializing where there had been only the bare cobbles of the old market-place, as a crowd always can, even out of silence and darkness.
* * *
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
« ^
It was by chance, some months later, that a paragraph in The Scotsman, which stated that the appeal of Herbert Stringer against his conviction for the murder of Joseph Lake had been dismissed, was in the same issue as one announcing that a portrait of Lady Arabella Hamilton, believed to be by Peter Paul Rubens, would be in a sale of pictures to be held at Sotheby’s next day.
Since Joe’s murder and the trial of Herbert Stringer had occurred in the far South, half a dozen lines disposed of the matter. The sale of the portrait was dealt with at far greater length. Its owners, after all, came of an old Edinburgh family and were resident in Scotland. The picture, besides, had first been identified as a Rubens by the late Mr. William Foster-Smith, whose books on the artistic treasures of Scotland had gained him, The Scotsman considered, a well-merited reputation.
On the Women’s Page there were photographs of the three Lockie sisters and some of their remarks on what it had felt like to find themselves owners of a painting by Rubens.
“I sometimes wish we’d never found out,” the eldest Miss Lockie was quoted as saying.
“We were so fond of her as she was before,” said Miss Phyllis Lockie.
“And now we have to get rid of her, in case we have burglars,” said Miss Dorothy Lockie.
“But of course we do not despise the money,” said all three together.
A strange and romantic part of the story, the writer continued, was that the painting had actually been stolen once already, when it was being sent for cleaning to Edinburgh, by thieves who had had no idea of its value, but had only wanted the car for a getaway. Then more than two years after the theft, it had been recognized in a saleroom by an old friend of the Lockies‘, who had bought it and returned it to them. And romance had followed romance, for the friend, Miss Virginia Winter, had recently become engaged to be married to Dr. Colin Lockie, in whose car the painting had been when it was stolen.
Colin was shown this story by a colleague in the University Staff Club, who asked, as Colin handed the paper back, “Isn’t it embarrassing to read that sort of thing about yourself?”
“Believe me, it could have been far worse,” Colin answered and proceeded to the bar, where Virginia, as he had been slowly getting into the habit of calling her, was to pick him up and tell him how she had fared during an afternoon of house-hunting.
Indeed, he thought, it could have been far, far worse.
Stringer’s defence at his trial had been that on seeing his employer killed by the lunatic, Lake, he had had a black-out and could remember nothing until he had come to himself in a strange, empty house. Why he had gone there, he had no idea, but on recovering his memory, he had immediately tried to track down the murderer, who, on being charged with his guilt, had attacked him, so that Stringer had had to shoot him in self-defence.
Counsel for the defence had claimed that Joe Lake had certainly been insane, since he had apparently believed that his wife had been carrying on a love affair with Edmund Greer, of which there was no evidence at all. There was no evidence that she had even met Mr. Greer, except most briefly in the saleroom, where he had occasionally bid for some article that had taken his fancy—a Sheraton tea-caddy, for instance, and a Queen Anne soup-ladle. It remained a bit of a mystery, of course, what had happened to Mrs. Lake. Nothing had been seen or heard of her since the day following Greer’s murder, except for a rumour that she had been seen in Scotland. A woman answering to her description was said to have been chased out of their home, late one night, by three elderly ladies, armed with golf-clubs. But wasn’t there a certain improbability about that story?
Without anything actually having been said on the matter, a feeling had begun to go round the court that if ever Beryl Lake turned up again, it would be as a corpse, done to death by her husband.
However, the jury had not liked the look of Stringer. The story that they had chosen to believe was that the accused, on finding Greer dead, had assumed at once that he would be suspected, had promptly helped himself to what he could in the house and gone into hiding. But later he had had second thoughts. He had realized that his actions had made it impossible for him to claim any legacy his employer might have left him, so he had set out to obtain a signed confession from Joe Lake, and had been meaning, as soon as he had it, to shoot Lake in cold blood, together with the other three people in the room, to leave the gun in Joe’s hand and to disappear once more, later to be found wandering with his memory still missing.
His assumption that he would be suspected of the murder and that it was necessary to clear himself before venturing anywhere near the police, had been found easily understandable when it had come out that he had a long record of robbery with violence, in fact, had gone to his last employment straight from prison.
Somehow, all through the trial, all mention of the picture had been avoided. Colin and Ginny had had to give evidence and for a few days their names had occurred uncomfortably often in the press, yet they had been asked no questions about their trip to Hopewood on the night of the murder. Before the trial, of course, there had been endless sessions with the police, during which both of them had made and signed long statements which gave a full account of their actions. But neither prosecution nor defence had thought that it would help either case to bemuse the jury with the complexities of market overt, so a curtain had been allowed to fall over the adventures of the Decayed Gentlewoman. Colin’s belief, as a matter of fact, was that the police had never believed a word of it.
He had ordered drinks for himself and Ginny and they had just been put down in front of him when he saw her coming towards him. She was carrying a newspaper and he noticed that she had a slightly flushed look of excitement. Thinking that she must have been reading the interview with the aunts, or else seen the note about Stringer, he picked up the drinks and went to meet her. He was preparing to tell her that this must be pretty well the last that they would hear of Stringer and that it was time to start thinking of other things. For reminders of the time in Oldersfield had unpredictable effects on her spirits.
She and Harriet had both grieved for Joe, Harriet so much that she had sold the café and gone off to try to forget her sorrows on a bus tour in Jugo-Slavia.
But Colin’s concern was unnecessary. With her usual single-mindedness, Ginny, on the trail of a flat, had not thought of reading anything in the newspaper but the property advertisements, and her excitement was because she had seen and fallen in love with a flat.
“It’s really a beauty,” she said as they sat down together. “It’s extraordinary to find anything like it on my first day out hunting. But it’s been an altogether extraordinary day. I thought I knew Scotland pretty well, but it turns out I’m a complete foreigner. These advertisements are written in a language I’ve never even heard spoken before. Of course I know everyone’s a foreigner when it comes to reading house-agents’ prose, but listen—what’s a main door house? What’s a lower-flatted villa? What’s a public roup? Well, never mind, I’ve found this wonderful flat and I’ve got the keys here and I thought we might go round now to take a look at it together. Then, if you like it, I thought we might write this evening, making an offer—”
“Not on your life!” Colin broke in, making her turn a startled face to him.
“But it’s really wonderful, Colin,” she said. “It’s true the bathroom’s just an old cupboard and hasn’t got a window, and the kitchen’s a very forbidding sort of place and I’ve no idea how we’d warm it, but still, it’s got lovely big Georgian rooms with exquisite ceilings and one Adam fireplace, which I’m almost ready to believe is a real one, and—”
“That isn’t the point.” Firmly Colin stemmed the flow. “In Scotland, if you make an offer in a letter and it’s accepted by letter, that’s a sale. You don’t have to wait for a contract to be signed. You don’t put down a deposit. It’s complete, finished.”
“I see,” she said. “That sounds nice and quick and easy.”
“Yes, but try writing that letter yourself and you’re probably going to find yourself stuck with the place, with no chance to back out, even if it’s crumbling with dry rot. So it’s very important to get it written by a lawyer, who knows how to put in all the necessary conditions on which we make the offer.”
“Ah, a lawyer.” He saw a gleam in her eyes. “So here we go again. I wonder what strange things he’ll have to tell us this time. I’ll tell you something, Colin—going to lawyers could easily become a vice with me. They tell you such amazing, improbable things. No one else would ever dare tell you such improbable things. It’s very stimulating to the imagination.”
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[scanned anonymously in a galaxy far far away]
[A 3S Release— v1, html]
[February 2014]
The Decayed Gentlewoman Page 18