The Crime and the Crystal

by E. X. Ferrars

  “Has this man Preston a motive for telling a lie about you?” Andrew asked.

  “Nothing special that I know of. We’ve fallen out once or twice because he’s got a habit of giving the wrong change, but I’ve always supposed that was muddle-mindedness and I haven’t made much of a fuss about it. And perhaps that’s what this trouble is, just muddle on his part. He may have mixed me up with somebody else, and the more he’s questioned about it, the more stubborn he gets that he’s been telling the truth, as stupid people do, I believe.”

  “Wasn’t there some sort of record of the sale?”

  “Not one that told one anything.”

  “But, Jan, I thought from what Tony told me that the police know you couldn’t have done the murder. There’s the matter of your husband’s body having been dragged a long way, which they recognize would be quite beyond you.”

  “I know, I know. But I get so tired of it and sometimes, I can’t help it, I get frightened.”

  Tears began to trickle down her cheeks.

  “There,” she said, “I knew this would happen sooner or later. Please don’t take any notice of it.”

  But it would have been difficult not to, for in a moment she had broken into convulsive sobbing.

  Andrew rolled over onto an elbow, taking a long look out to sea, giving her time either to have a good cry or to recover herself, whichever it was that she wanted to do. Once the crying had been reduced to a few sniffs, he said, “Jan, do you know who did it?” “No.”

  “Quite sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you any suspicions?”

  “That’s something I prefer not to talk about. There’s been too much talk of that kind already.”

  “Yes, I see. But it sounds as if whoever did it did you a good turn. You’ve benefited in more ways than one, haven’t you? Of course that’s why the police keep on at you. Tell me, what made you marry Luke?”

  She used the pebble with which she had been drawing the pattern on the sand to obliterate it in a sudden, swift gesture. “Ignorance. Stupidity. Bitterness. Believe it or not of someone of my generation, I was completely ignorant of sex and what it can do to you. And he was very good-looking and had very attractive manners and I was so stupid I thought that meant he was gentle and understanding when the truth was that he was a classical case of paranoia. He got insanely jealous from the moment we got married and insisted that I’d got to submit to him in everything, and if I didn’t, he knocked me about. He enjoyed that. There was a very sadistic streak in him. I’d bruises to prove it. And bitterness—well, I told you I’d been more or less in love with Tony most of my life, but he just didn’t seem to be aware of my existence. He was so used to my being around that he didn’t bother to notice me. And I took for granted that he never would and simply accepted it as a natural thing that if I ever wanted to get married I’d have to think of someone else. And it seemed a good thing that Luke was as unlike Tony as anyone I could find. Then the irony of things was that as soon as I married Luke, Tony woke up to the fact that he hadn’t wanted to lose me and that really he’d been in love with me all along…” She paused and gave Andrew a puzzled stare. It struck him that one of the strange things about her great eyes was that they hardly ever blinked. “Why am I talking to you like this?”

  “Didn’t you come down to the beach, looking for me, because you needed someone to talk to?” he said.

  “Yes, but that was about something different. It was about Sergeant Ross coming to see me this morning. I was so upset and so—so angry, so furious—that I had to explode. D’you know what that wretched old man Preston’s been saying?”

  Andrew had no need to say no, but she seemed to require him to say it, so he did so.

  “He says there was another customer in the shop when I came in,” she hurried on, “which there wasn’t, and he says he’s just remembered who she was. She was a woman called Mayhew. Mrs. Maud Mayhew. She used to live in Hartwell and was a customer of his. And he says that she’ll be able to corroborate what he’s said all along, that it was about twelve o’clock when I came in. The only thing is, she’s moved away to Sydney, which of course is in New South Wales, and if they want to bring her back to South Australia as a witness, they’ll have to get extradition for her and it’ll take a bit of time, even supposing they can find her. So really that man Ross came just to try to frighten me and see if I’d crack when he threw this at me. I nearly did. I don’t mean I nearly admitted anything, but I nearly started crying, just as I did just now, and in front of someone like him it would have been too humiliating. It was so horrible…” She gave an impatient rub at her eyes with her wrist, as if they had filled with tears again.

  “If you don’t mind going on talking about these things a little longer,” Andrew said, “can you tell me what the police make of your husband’s body having been dragged down from where he was killed to the billabong, or whatever you call it? What was the point of doing that? It doesn’t make sense to me.”

  “The only thing they’ve come up with,” she answered, “is that whoever dragged him down was intending to get him into a car, to take him away and bury him in the bush where he’d never be found unless dingoes dug him up. But then either this person was disturbed before he got to the car by someone else coming to the quarry so that he had to make a bolt for it, or else he found he simply couldn’t handle the weight of the body and just dropped it and made off. I can’t think of any other reason myself. But now I’d as soon we didn’t go on talking about all this. Let’s try something else. Christmas, for instance. You know we’re going to my sister’s for our Christmas dinner, don’t you?”

  Christmas. It was only two days away. But not Christmas as he was accustomed to thinking of it. Not a white Christmas with big fires burning and holly decorating the rooms and with a spirit of festivity especially welcome because it broke the long depression of winter. The sort of Christmas which Andrew, who had neither children nor grandchildren, had in fact very seldom experienced, yet which, since his own childhood, had seemed the only authentic pattern of it. Instead there would be burning sunshine, a sky of incredible blue, shining sea and sparkling sand. Looking around him, he found it very difficult to think that this could really be Christmas time.

  “Tony told me about it,” he said.

  “They live quite near, only a little way down there…” She pointed at the row of bungalows built above the beach. “You’ll like Kay. And Denis is nice too. That’s her husband. He’s Director of the Institute where Tony works and Tony ought to take you to meet him. He’d be glad to see you.” Her mood appeared all in a moment to have changed completely. She was talking now as if all that she was interested in was a minor social matter. “Kay’s clever. I don’t mean she’s an intellectual sort of person. She doesn’t read much or care about music or painting, but she’s good with people. She’s good at understanding what’s going on in their minds. She can tell you what they’re really like when she’s only met them once or twice.”

  “Is she older than you?”

  “Three years. But I suppose because our mother died when we were very young I’ve always depended on her more than you’d expect with such a small difference between us. I think she’s a wonderful person.”

  Andrew wondered why Kay, if she was so perceptive, had not understood Luke Wilding enough to have warned her younger sister against him.

  Sitting up, he reached for his shoes.

  “Jan, tell me something and please be honest about it,” he said. “I know you and Tony have your troubles at the moment. I knew nothing about them when I wrote and asked if I should visit you, and naturally I wouldn’t have done it if I’d had a hint of the facts. But wouldn’t it be easiest for you now if I moved on and got out of your way? It must be a bother to have a stranger around when you’ve so much to worry about.”

  She stared at him in her unblinking fashion. “Do you want to leave us?”

  “Of course not, I just thought it might be easier for you�
��”

  She interrupted him by taking his face in her hands and planting a kiss on his mouth. Then she jumped up and before he had finished tying his shoelaces had scampered away towards her home.

  Chapter Three

  Andrew put the same question to Tony later in the day. Would it be easier for him and Jan if he were to move on? The Wilkies in Sydney would not expect him yet, but Christmas, Andrew said, did not mean much to him and he would be quite happy to spend it in a hotel. Tony seemed astonished at the question. Of course, he said, he and Jan wanted Andrew to stay, to stay even longer than he had planned, as he had already suggested.

  “The fact is,” Tony said, “you’re a help to us. Perhaps I ought to have let you know all about it before you came, but when we’re by ourselves we either talk incessantly about Wilding’s murder, or we’re so careful to keep off it that we’re quite unlike our real selves. I’m a suspect, you see, because I’ve married a rich wife, and pretty soon after her husband died too. We keep coming back to the question of whether or not the police believe in my alibi. Actually I was in my lab in Betty Hill that morning, but I happened not to see anybody, and I’d time to drive up to Hartwell and could have done it without being seen.”

  “What sort of alibi has Jan’s father?” Andrew asked. “He lives pretty close to the spot, doesn’t he?”

  “He’s no alibi at all. He was working in his vineyard and there was no one to corroborate that either, and we go round and round that too. But you’ve brought something in from outside, for which we’re very grateful.”

  That was the end of the matter. Andrew stayed on. When Christmas Day came he and Jan and Tony set off to join the festivities at the house of Jan’s sister, Kay, and her husband, Denis Lightfoot.

  Though the distance from the Gardiners’ bungalow to the Lightfoots’ was not great, they went by car. The Gardiners’ car was a Holden, about seven years old. It had interested Andrew during the last few days to observe that although Jan was supposed to have inherited a good deal of money from her first husband, she and Tony gave very few signs of having more to live on than his salary. Andrew had been told that her work in the craft shop was voluntary and he recognized that although she acted as if she were a normal employee, sticking conscientiously to regular hours, this was mainly because she wanted it to be taken seriously. He had also encountered an Italian woman in the house who came in for a day once a week to clean it and whose wages were not small. And as Tony told him, they had bought the house outright, without a mortgage. But the house itself was small, its furnishing was good but not at all luxurious, and the car was old and even in its early days had never been a grand one. They had a second car, a small Volvo, but that also was several years old. Andrew guessed that this relative economy was simply because they did not want it to appear that they had profited by Luke Wilding’s death. It must be well known that they had, yet it seemed that they shrank from making any display of it and might continue to do so until his murderer was found.

  The Lightfoots had a much larger bungalow than the Gardiners, a modern one which overlooked the beach. The long window of its spacious living room looked straight out to sea, which today was not as calm as it had been ever since Andrew’s arrival. Small crests of white topped the waves as they came slanting in towards the shore, and the breakers there, small though they were, were bigger than he had yet seen them. But the sky was clear, the sunshine warm, the breeze that came in from the sea only a light one and the temperature was only a little less sweltering than it had been for the last few days.

  As soon as he met his host, Andrew began to have an uncomfortable feeling that he was overdressed. He was in a light grey suit which he thought of as his tropical one, suitable for a festive occasion such as this, but Denis Lightfoot was in shorts, a brightly patterned, short-sleeved shirt and sandals. He was about forty-five, a man of about the same height as Andrew, who was six foot, and had an oval face with neat, regular features, grey eyes, good teeth which he showed in a frequent yet rather expressionless smile, and light brown hair that was already receding from his forehead. It was he who opened the door when Jan, Tony and Andrew arrived. He gave Jan a kiss, said “Hallo” to Tony, grasped Andrew by the hand, said how glad he was to see him and led the way to the living room to meet his wife and the other guests who had arrived before them.

  The room was a long one, with pale grey walls, a white carpet, white curtains and light-coloured modern furniture. There was a fireplace with logs in the grate, but they had an almost sculptured look, as if they had been carefully arranged and no one had dreamt that they might ever be lit. On a low coffee table in the centre of the room was a big, milky-white chunk of quartz crystal.

  Kay Lightfoot came quickly forward to greet Andrew. At a glance he could have seen that she was Jan’s sister, though she was a good deal the taller of the two and far more sturdily built. She was a shapely woman, however, firm-breasted and small-waisted. Her hair was of the same fair colour as Jan’s, but had been cut short by a skilful hairdresser. Only her eyes were completely different from her sister’s. They had not the over-largeness of Jan’s, or the haunted look that dominated all her other features, but in their way they were arresting too, for they were very dark, in striking contrast to the fairness of her hair. They were watchful eyes, intent and searching. Not much, Andrew thought, would escape them. She was wearing a sleeveless dress of black-and-white cotton, which, simple as it was, had the subtle air of being expensive. If the Gardiners had inherited a fortune, even one of only moderate size, it looked as if the Lightfoots, by whatever means, had come into possession of more.

  “We’re so glad to meet you at last, Professor,” Kay said. “No, I can call you Andrew, can’t I? We’ve heard so much about you from Tony. He was thrilled when he heard you were really coming out to Australia again, and I said at once he must bring you to us for Christmas.”

  Her voice was very like Jan’s, high-pitched though perhaps not quite as soft, and it made Andrew reflect that voices run in families even more than build or facial characteristics. If Kay and Jan had been out of sight, talking, he would not have been sure which was which.

  “We’re drinking champagne,” Kay said. “Would you like that, or would you sooner have whisky or vodka?”

  Andrew accepted the champagne and had a long glass put into his hand. Then he was taken to be introduced to the other guests. There were four of them—a young couple called Nicholl; a woman of thirty who turned out to be the Sara Massingham who owned the craft shop where Jan worked; and Bob Wilding, Jan’s stepson, who was what Tony had called more or less engaged to Sara Massingham. The stepson who was older than she was. It surprised Andrew a little to find him here now and to learn that he was actually staying in the house. However, if he was on friendly terms with the Lightfoots, and so probably with Jan and Tony too, all it could mean was that he was not one of the people who suspected Jan of being in any way involved in his father’s murder.

  Nevertheless, as Andrew chatted to the young man, who was tall, dark-haired, blue-eyed and uncommonly good-looking in a bony-featured, hollow-cheeked way, he could not quite put it out of his mind that Bob Wilding had benefited by his father’s death as much as Jan. So why should he not be prepared to be on the friendliest of terms with her, even if he did not altogether believe in her innocence?

  They talked inevitably about Andrew’s journey and about whether or not he liked Australia, and Denis Lightfoot apologized to him for the climate being so hot, to which he replied that apart from the pleasure of seeing old friends, it had been the thought of the heat and the sunshine in darkest December that had drawn him back to the country.

  Sara Massingham was almost as tall as Bob Wilding. She had straight black hair brushed smoothly back from her forehead, dark eyes and a narrow face with an exquisite complexion. She was very slender and was wearing green slacks and a green blouse with a delicate silver necklace at her throat. A beautiful woman who moved with grace as well as having a look of intelligence, t
hough also with a certain remoteness about her.

  An enormous turkey was served in a dining room that had a cleverly designed pseudo-Georgian air about it. Andrew found himself seated on Kay’s right with Clare Nicholl beside him. She was about the same age as Jan, a small, rather plump girl with short curly red hair and eyes that were really green. It occurred to him, meeting them, how the eyes that are called green usually are actually grey with only a faint tinge of green in them, but hers, smiling at him out of a round, plump face which was brown from the sun, were so green that they gave her an elfish look, not quite human. She might have been one of the strange creatures whom he had imagined as popping out to watch him from among the twisted roots of the Morton Bay figs in the Botanic Garden.

  But her appetite for turkey was entirely human. After a first substantial helping she had a second, chatting to Andrew and to Bob Wilding, who sat on the other side of her, mostly about her garden and the fruit in it, the raspberries, the apricots, the strawberries which had already had one season and were now achieving a second, the beans and the zucchinis. Her chief interests seemed to be connected with edible things, which perhaps accounted for her quite pretty plumpness.