"Perfectly."
"Good. Have some more Chartreuse. Well, Emma seems to me the most concentrated of the possible suspects. No one could call Serge concentrated, except on the thing of the moment. Serge spends his life having flaring rows, and has never shown signs of killing anyone. The farthest he ever gets is to fling whatever happens to come handiest."
"Lacking a whip," Grant said; and told her of his interview with Serge. "And Weekley?"
"On form, to use your own excellent metaphor, Silas is only a pound or two behind Emma; but quite definitely behind. Silas has his own success, his family, the books he is going to write in the future (even if they are just the same old ones over again in different words); Silas's interest isn't channelled the way Emma's is. Short of having a brainstorm, some unreasoning hatred, Silas would have no urge to get rid of Leshe. Nor would Toby. Toby's life simply coruscates with variety. Toby would never think of killing anyone. As I told you, he has too many other ways of making the score even. But Emma. Emma has nothing but Liz."
She thought it over for a moment, and Grant let the silence lie uninterrupted.
"You should have seen Emma when Walter and Liz announced their engagement," she said at last. "She— she positively glittered. She was a walking Christmas tree. It was what she had always wanted, and against all probability it had happened. Walter, who met all the clever and beautiful women of this generation, had fallen in love with Liz and they were going to be married. Walter would get Trimmings one day, and Lavinia's fortune, so even if his vogue went they would have as much of this world's goods as anyone could possibly want or use. It was a fairy-tale come true. She was floating just an inch or two off the ground. Then Leslie Searle came."
Marta, the actress, let the silence come back. And being also an artist she left it unbroken.
The logs slipped and spluttered, sending up fresh jets of flame, and Grant lay still in his chair and thought about Emma Garrowby.
And about the two things that Marta did not know.
It was odd that Marta's chosen suspect should occupy the same area as the two unaccountables in this case: the glove in Searle's drawer, and the space in the photographic box.
Emma. Emma Garrowby. The woman who had brought up a younger sister and when that sister moved out from under her wing married a widower with a young child. She channeled her interest as naturally as Toby Tullis spread his wide, didn't she? She had been radiant—"a walking Christmas tree"—over the engagement; and in the period since that engagement (it was five months, he happened to know, not twelve) her initial delight must have spread and amplified to something much more formidable; an acceptance; a sense of achievement, of security. The engagement had stood whatever small shocks it had encountered in these five months, and Emma must have got used to thinking of it as safe and immutable.
And then, as Marta said, Leslie Searle.
Searle with his charm and his fly-by-night life. Searle with his air of being not quite of this world. No one could view this modern shower of gold with more instant distrust than Emma Garrowby.
"What would fit into a space 10 inches, by VA by 4?" Grant asked.
"A hair brush," said Marta.
There was a game played by psychologists, Grant remembered, where the victim said the first thing that occurred to him on hearing a given word. It must work out pretty well, all things considered. He had put this same proposition to Bill Maddox, and Maddox, as unhesitatingly as Marta had said "A hair brush," had said "A spanner." He remembered that Williams had proffered a bar of soap.
"Anything else?"
"A set of dominoes. A box of envelopes? No, a shade on the small side. Packs of cards? Enough cards to set up on a desert island! Table cutlery. The family spoons. Someone been secreting the family silver?"
"No. It is just something I wondered about"
"If it's the Trimmings silver, just let it go, my dear. It wouldn't fetch thirty shillings the lot at an auction sale." Her eye went in unconscious satisfaction to the Georgian simplicity of her own implements on the table behind her. "Tell me, Alan, it wouldn't be indiscreet or unprofessional, would it, to tell me who is your own favourite for the part?"
"The part?"
"The killer."
"It would be both unprofessional and indiscreet. But I don't think there is any wild indiscretion in telling you that I don't think there is one."
"What! You really think Leslie Searle is still alive? Why?"
Why indeed, he asked himself. What was there in the set-up that gave him this feeling of being at a performance? Of being pushed into the stalls so that’ an orchestra pit intervened between him and reality. The Assistant Commissioner had once said to him in an unwonted moment of expansiveness that he had the most priceless of all attributes for his job: flair. "But don't let it ride you, Grant," he had said. "Keep your eye on the evidence." Was this a sample of letting his flair ride him? The chances were ninety-nine to one that Searle had fallen into the river. All the evidence pointed that way. If it hadn't been for the complication of the quarrel with Whitmore, he, Grant, would not have entered into the affair at all; it would have been a simple case of "missing believed drowned."
And yet. And yet Now you see it, now you don't. That old conjurer's phrase. It haunted him.
Half consciously he said it aloud.
Marta stared and said: "A conjuring trick? By whom? For what?"
"I don't know. I just have a strong feeling that I'm being taken for a ride!"
"You think that Leslie just walked away somehow?"
"Or someone planned it to look like that. Or something. I have a strong feeling of watching something being sawn in half."
"You're overworking," Marta said. "Where do you think Leslie could have disappeared to? Unless he just came back to the village and lay doggo somewhere."
Grant came wide awake and regarded her with admiration. "Oddly enough," he said, amused, "I had never thought of that. Do you think Toby is hiding him to make things difficult for Walter?"
"No, I know it doesn't make sense. But neither does your idea about .his walking away. Where would he walk to in the middle of the night in nothing but flannels and a raincoat?"
"I shall know more about that when I have seen his cousin tomorrow."
"He has a cousin? How surprising. It's like finding Mercury with an in-law. Who is he?"
"It's a woman. A painter, I understand. A delightful creature who has given up an Albert Hall Sunday afternoon concert to be at home for me. I used your telephone to make an assignation with her."
"And you expect her to know why Leslie walked away in the middle of the night in nothing but flannels and a raincoat?"
"I expect her to be able to suggest where Leslie might have been headed for."
'To borrow the callboy's immortal phrase: I hope it keeps fine for you," Marta said.
FOURTEEN
Grant drove back to Wickham through the spring night, cheered in body and soul.
And Emma Garrowby sat beside him all the way.
Flair might whisper soft seductions to him, but Emma was there in the middle of the picture, where Marta had set her, and she was much too solid to be conjured away. Emma made sense. Emma was example and precedent. The classic samples of ruthlessness were domestic. The Lizzie Bordens. Emma, if it came to that, was primordial. A female creature protecting its young. It required immense ingenuity to find a reason why Leslie Searle should have chosen to disappear. It needed no ingenuity at all to suggest why Emma Garrowby should have killed him.
In fact, it was a sort of perversity to keep harking back to the idea that Searle might have ducked. He could just hear the A.C, if he ever came before him with a theory like that Evidence, Grant, suggestive evidence. Common sense, Grant, common sense. Don't let your flair ride you. Grant, don't let your flair ride you. Disappear of his own accord? This happy young man who could pay his bills at the Westmorland, buy expensive clothes to wear and expensive sweets to give away, travel the world at other people's expense? T
his young man of such surprising good-looks that every head he encountered was turned either literally or metaphorically? This charming young man who liked plain little Liz so much that he kept a glove of hers? This professionally successful young man who was engaged in a deal that would bring him both money and kudos?
Common sense. Grant. Evidence, Grant. Don't let your flair ride you.
Consider Emma Garrowby, Grant. She had the opportunity. She had the motive. And, on form, she probably had the will. She knew where the camp was that night.
But she didn't know that they had come in to Salcott for a drink.
He wasn't drowned in Salcott.
She couldn't have known that she would find him alone. It was sheer chance that they separated that night.
Someone found him alone. Why not Emma?
How could it happen?
Perhaps she arranged it.
Emma! How?
Has it struck you that Searle engineered that exit of Walter's?
No. How?
It was Searle who was provocative. He provoked Walter to the point where he couldn't stand it a minute longer, and had either to go or stay and have a row. Searle got rid of Walter that evening.
Why should he?
Because he had an appointment
An appointment! With whom?
Liz Garrowby.
That is absurd. There is no evidence whatever that the Garrowby girl had any serious interest in—
Oh, it was not Liz who sent Searle the message to meet her.
No? Who then?
Emma.
You mean that Searle went to meet someone he thought was Liz?
Yes. He behaved like a lover, if you think about it.
How?
Do you remember how he took farewell of his acquaintances that night? The banter about going to their beds on so fine a spring night? The gaiety? The on-top-of-the-worldness?
He had just had several beers.
So had his companions. Some of them a great deal more than several. But were they singing metaphorical songs to the spring night? They were not. They were taking the shortest cut home to bed, even the youngest of them.
Well, it's a theory.
It is more than that. It is a theory in accordance with the evidence.
Evidence, Grant, evidence.
Don't let your flair ride you, Grant.
All the way along the dark lanes between Salcott St. Mary and Wickham, Emma Garrowby sat beside him. And when he went to bed he took her with him.
Because he was tired, and had dined well, and had at last seen a path of some kind open in front of him, he slept well. And when his eyes opened in daylight on The Hour Cometh in purple wool cross-stitch, he regarded the text as a promise rather than a warning. He looked forward to going to town, if only as a mental bath after his plunge into Salcott St. Mary. He could then come back and see it in proportion. You couldn't get the flavour of anything properly unless you cleaned your palate between times. He had wondered often how married men managed to combine their domestic lives with the absorbing demands of police work. It occurred to him now for the first time that married life must be the perfect palate-cleanser. There could be nothing like a spell of helping young Bobby with his algebra to bring you back with a fresh mind to the problem of the current crime.
At least he would be able to get some clean shirts, he thought. He put his things into his bag, and turned to go down to breakfast. It was Sunday and still early, but they would manage to give him something. As he opened the door of his room the telephone rang.
The White Hart's only concession to progress was to install bedside telephones. He crossed the room to the instrument and picked it up.
"Inspector Grant?" said the voice of the landlord. "Just a minute please; you're wanted on the phone." There was a moment's silence, and then he said: "Go ahead, please; you're through."
"Hullo."
"Alan?" said Marta's voice. "Is that you, Alan?"
"Yes, it's me. You're awake early, aren't you?"
"Listen, Alan. Something has happened. You must come out straight away."
"Out? To Salcott, you mean?"
"To the Mill House. Something has happened. It's very important or I wouldn't have called you so early."
"But what has happened? Can't you------"
"You're on a hotel telephone, aren't you?"
"Yes."
"I can't very well tell you, Alan. Something has turned up. Something that alters everything. Or rather, everything you—you believed in, so to speak."
"Yes. All right. I'll come at once."
"Have you had breakfast?"
"Not yet."
"I'll have some ready for you."
What a woman, he thought as he put back the receiver. He had always thought that the first requisite in a wife was intelligence, and now he was sure of it. There was no room in his life for Marta, and none in her life for him; but it was a pity, all the same. A woman who could announce a surprising development in a homicide case without babbling on the telephone was a prize, but one who could in the same breath ask if he had had breakfast and arrange to supply him with the one he had not had was above rubies.
He went to collect his car, full of speculation. What could Marta possibly have unearthed? Something that Searle had left the night he was there? Some piece of gossip that the milkman had brought?
One thing was certain: it was not a body. If it had been a body Marta, being Marta, would have conveyed as much, so that he could bring out with him all the necessary paraphernalia and personnel to deal with such a discovery.
It was a day of high wind and rainbows. The halcyon time of windless sunlight that comes each year to the English spring when the first dust lies on the roads was over. Spring was all of a sudden wild and robust Glittering showers slanted across the landscape. Great clouds soared up over the horizon and swept in shrieking squalls across the sky. The trees cowered, and plumed themselves, and cowered again.
The countryside was deserted. Not because of the weather but because it was Sunday. Some of the cottages, he observed, still had their blinds drawn. People who got up at the crack of dawn during the week, and had no animals to get them up on Sunday, must be glad to sleep late. He had grumbled often when his police duties had broken into his private Life (a luxury grumble, since he could have retired years ago when his aunt left him her money), but to spend one's life in bondage to the predilections of animals must be a sad waste of a free man's time.
As he brought the car up to the landward side of the Mill House, where the door was, Marta came out to greet him. Marta never "dressed the part" in the country as so many of her colleagues did. She looked on the country rather as the country people themselves did, as a place to be lived in; not something that one put on specially bright and casual clothes for. If her hands were cold she wore gloves. She did not feel that she must look like a gipsy just because she happened to live in the Mill House at Salcott St. Mary. She was therefore looking as chic and sophisticated this morning as though she were receiving him on the steps of Stanworth. But he thought she had a shocked look. Indeed she looked as though she had quite lately been very sick.
"Alan! You can't imagine how glad I was to hear your voice on the telephone. I was afraid that you might have gone to town, early as it was."
"What is this that has turned up so unexpectedly?" he asked making for the door. But she led him round and down to the kitchen door at the side of the house.
"It was your follower, Tommy Thrupp, that found it. Tommy is mad on fishing. And he quite often goes out before breakfast to fish, because apparently that is a good time." The "apparently" was typically Marta, he thought. Marta had lived by the river for years and still had to take someone else's word about the proper time for fishing. "On Sundays he usually takes something in his pocket and doesn't come back—something to eat, I mean—but this morning he came back inside an hour because he had—because he had caught something very odd."
She opened the bright
green door and led him into the kitchen. In the kitchen were Tommy Thrupp and his mother. Mrs. Thrupp was huddled over the stove as if she also was feeling not too well, but Tommy came to meet them in sparkling form. There was nothing sickly about Tommy. Tommy was transfigured. He was translated. He was six feet high and crowned with lightning.
"Look, sir! Look what I fished up!" he said, before Marta could say anything, and drew Grant to the kitchen table. On the table, carefully placed on several thicknesses of newspaper so as to preserve the scrubbed perfection of the wood, was a man's shoe.
"I'll never be able to bake on that table again," moaned Mrs. Thrupp, not looking round.
Grant glanced at the shoe and remembered the police description of the missing man's clothes.
"It's Searle's, I take it," he said.
"Yes," Marta said.
It was a brown shoe, and instead of being laced it was tied with a buckle and strap across the instep. It was waterlogged and very muddy.
"Where did you fish it up, Tommy?"
" 'Bout a hundred yards down-stream from the big bend."
"I suppose you didn't think of marking the place?"
"A course I marked it!" Tommy said, hurt
"Good for you. Presently you'll have to show me the place. Meanwhile wait here, will you. Don't go out and talk about this."
"No sir, I won't No one's in on this but me and the police."
A little brightened by this version of the situation, Grant went upstairs to the telephone in the living-room and called Inspector Rodgers. After some delay, since the station had to connect him to the Rodgers's home, he was put through to him, and broke the news that the river would have to be dragged again and why.
"Oh, lord!" groaned Rodgers. "Did the Thrupp boy say where he fished it up?"
"About a hundred yards down from the big bend, if that conveys anything to you."
"Yes. That's about two hundred yards down-stream from where they had their bivouac. We did the stretch with a small-tooth comb. You don't think that perhaps
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