A Tangled Web

by Nicholas Blake

  Thorne had next visited the Amberleys, from whom he took a statement about the revolver episode.

  “So Bland went to their house to try and make them hush it up?” said Nailsworth. “We’ve got good grounds for taking her into custody, sir.”

  “What do you say, Thorne?” asked the Chief Constable.

  “I’d advise against it for the present. I’ve reasons to think she’ll come clean in a day or so. And I’ll be interviewing her again myself, as soon as she’s in a fit state.” Thorne was relieved that the others did not press him for his “reasons,” arising as they did from a brief conversation with Jaques after the girl had gone up to bed.

  So it was that, when Hugo Chesterman was charged at the Magistrates’ Court on Monday, the only witness called was Chief Inspector Nailsworth. He gave evidence of the arrest and the formal charge in London. The prisoner, who spoke no word except to reply in the affirmative when asked if he desired legal aid, was remanded for a week so that the police might pursue their investigations.

  17. The Second Betrayal

  “But why can’t I go and see him?”

  “I’ve tried to explain, Daisy,” Jacko spoke patiently, but the solicitous smile on his face was wearing thin. “There’d be a police officer in the room, and he’d report everything you and Hugo said. You can’t talk freely to Hugo, don’t you understand—especially after refusing to say anything to Inspector Thorne last night.”

  “But I don’t want to talk about—about what happened. I just want to see him, and tell him I love him and believe in him.”

  “He knows that,” said Jacko, rather perfunctorily. He was debating with himself whether the moment had come to turn on the heat. Daisy’s obstinacy had become quite trying: and after as good as promising Thorne last night that he would himself take in hand the softening-up process, Jacko was getting impatient for results.

  The sound of the evening paper dropping through the letter-box took him out into the hall. On his way back he entered the lavatory, brushed back the grey hair over his temples, and gave himself a lopsided experimental grin in the mirror. He knew the girl was waiting, with every nerve stretched, for the news from the Southbourne Magistrates’ Court: she can wait a little longer, he thought, as he opened the paper and began to read. Daisy’s calm and equable temperament had always irked him: it was pleasant to see that calm shattered and watch her blindly groping to pick up the fragments. “‘Just want to tell him I love him and believe in him!’ Silly bitch! A fat lot of good that’d do him!” he muttered, furiously aware at last of Daisy’s loving heart as of an antagonist whose strength he had misjudged and whose downfall had become an obsession with him. Jacko stared into the mirror, into the sick, dilated eyes which met him there, as though they were Daisy’s and he was hypnotising her, willing her to share his own damnation.

  “He’s been remanded in custody for a week,” said Jacko, returning to the drawing-room. “And they’ve granted him legal aid, so you needn’t worry about that.”

  “They’ll let me see him now, won’t they?”

  “He’ll be allowed to have visitors.” Jacko paused, observing how Daisy’s face lit up, her whole body seemed enlivened. The throaty, crooning note returned to his voice, as he went on, “But you’ve got to be sensible about this, my dear. Do believe me, I’m trying to act in your best interests—and it’s only what Hugo himself wants you to do.”

  He had only to say Hugo’s name for the girl to vibrate, as if an electric circuit had been completed, and lean forward eagerly in her chair.

  “When I saw him, just before he was arrested, he told me to tell you that, if anything happened to him, you must not withhold information from the police.” Jacko’s brown eyes were fastened upon hers, not compulsively, but with an anxious, affectionate, honeyed look. “He said, if the police ask Daisy about it, she must tell them exactly what happened that night.’”

  “But why?” Daisy almost wailed.

  “Because—he told me this himself—he doesn’t want his child to be born in prison.”

  “Oh, they wouldn’t do that! Why should they put me in prison?”

  Jacko explained again, with a patience renewed by the fascination of the game he was playing, the significance of accomplice before and after the fact. “Last night,” he concluded, “after you’d gone to bed, Inspector Thorne gave me a friendly warning. He said the police would have no alternative but to charge you with complicity if you went on refusing to make a statement. I managed to postpone it for a little, on the grounds of your health; but I shan’t be able to hold them off any longer.”

  “If only I could see Hugo, and make sure that’s what he really wants.”

  Perceiving another opportunity, Jacko moved rapidly in. “I can tell you this, my dear. They certainly won’t let you see him unless you’ve answered their questions first. Once you’ve made a statement, there’ll be no difficulty about visiting him.”

  Daisy picked at her handkerchief. The streak of common sense, which had come to her rescue before now, made her say, “But look, Jacko. If they really believe Hugo did it, won’t I be—what did you call it?—an accomplice after the fact for helping him bury the revolver?”

  It was a great moment for Jacko, so rewarding that he must get up and draw the curtains to conceal from Daisy the triumph on his face and compose it to its normal friendly solicitude. Controlling his voice, he said over his shoulder, “The revolver? Well, of course I don’t know anything about that. But—”

  “I shouldn’t have told you. I’m afraid it’s putting just another burden on you,” the girl said, with innocent compunction. Then, trying to smile, “I suppose that’s made you an accomplice after the fact now.”

  Jacko sat down on the arm of her chair, and took her hand. “You mustn’t tell me anything you feel you shouldn’t. But I know you’ve been worrying about the revolver. And if it would help—”

  Daisy suddenly burst into passionate, desolate weeping, and gripped the man’s hand frantically as if she were drowning.

  “Oh, Jacko, it was so awful!” she said, when she had got herself under control at last. Then the whole story of that episode on the beach came out.

  The bloody fool, Jacko was thinking as he gently stroked the girl’s hair—letting her in on it, instead of burying the gun by himself. Such folly of human trustfulness aroused his mind to an ecstasy of contempt, and he saw with beautiful clarity his next move.

  “My poor Daisy,” he said. “What a horrible business for you. Of course, this does make a difference.”

  “Hugo was frightened of what might happen if he was found with the revolver. Not because he shot the Inspector, but because he’d been in prison,” she valiantly replied. “You don’t think—?”

  “It’s what the police will think, my dear. No, you’d better not tell them about that.” Jacko paused meditatively. “Did anyone see you and Hugo on the beach?”

  Daisy blushed a little. “I’m sure no one saw us burying the gun.”

  “No, but now the police have got a description of you both, they’ll be combing Southbourne for eye-witnesses. There’s a great danger that someone’ll come forward and say, ‘I saw them on the beach together the next morning.’ Just that would be quite enough. The police will say to themselves, ‘What on earth were they doing on the beach? They’d hardly be making sand-castles when they were admittedly in such agitation about the murder.’ And the answer’d be obvious, even to a policeman’s limited intelligence. So they’d go and dig up the beach where you were seen.”

  “Oh, God! What am I to do? What am I to do?”

  Jacko pouted his lips and drew them in again. “We must get there first, my dear. Find the gun and put it somewhere it simply can’t be found.”

  “No, Jacko. I’ll go alone. Why should you be mixed up in it? I don’t want you to get into trouble too.”

  “My dear child, of course I’ll come with you,” Jacko lusciously answered. “It’s the least I can do, for you and poor old Hugo.”

/>   They discussed how they might best shake off the plainclothes man and find their way to the beach unobserved. Daisy’s morale was soaring at the thought of doing something at last—since parting from Hugo she had lived in a kind of stupor, broken only by the abortive visit to the Amberleys, her life measured out in rows of knitting—and Jacko made it sound like a delightful, venturesome game. To-morrow he had patients he must see. But on Wednesday he could cancel his morning appointments. After an early breakfast, Daisy was to leave the house, quite openly, with a shopping basket. If she was followed, she must try to slip the plainclothes man in one of the big Kensington High Street stores: but Jacko did not think she would be, for until her “collapse” yesterday she had regularly taken a short morning walk. Jacko would make his own way to Waterloo. They would travel separately, but get off the train at the station before Southbourne and there hire a car to drive them the rest of the way: the danger of their being noticed at the Southbourne station, by a policeman who had her description or Jacko’s, would be avoided thus.

  There remained the problem of Inspector Thorne. If he turned up to-morrow to interview Daisy again, they agreed that she must see him, and give him her account of the happenings at Southbourne—except for the burying of the revolver. Jacko said that the Inspector would be satisfied, once he had her statement, and with any luck would not arrest her. The alternative—that Jacko should tell him Daisy was not yet fit to be interviewed—seemed hopeless; for then she could not possibly walk out of the house the next morning.

  Inspector Thorne, to Daisy’s relief, did not turn up the following day—for the very good reason that Jacko had given him on the telephone a résumé of this conversation with the girl. Hardened as Thorne was to the ways of normal malefactors, he found Jaques’s cynical treachery almost more than he could stomach. But, unless the weapon was discovered, the case against Chesterman would remain so flimsy that the Director of Public Prosecutions might well refuse to take it up. What riled Thorne especially was Jaques’s increasing impudence: the man had the audacity to suggest that, in return for his co-operation with the police, they should withdraw the plainclothes men who were keeping his house under surveillance—it was bad for his professional reputation to have busies hanging around, he outrageously complained. Moreover, Jaques made it quite plain to Thorne that he considered himself indispensable, as a sort of expert consultant: only Daisy Bland, he told Thorne, knew the precise spot where the revolver had been buried, and he himself was the only person who could persuade her to reveal it. Thorne had seen enough of the girl, during his brief interview with her on Sunday, to realise that this at least was true. What had not occurred to the bastard Jaques, in his insensate egotism or hatred or power-mania, Thorne grimly reflected, was that mine-detectors could now do the job: but it would take a deal of time and organisation to sweep a two-mile-long beach with mine-detectors; and besides, if the girl herself were caught in the act of recovering the revolver, her resistance was bound to break down all along the line. This, no doubt, was the conclusion which Jaques had intended him to reach. Thorne felt a new wave of disgust as he realised it: however, he had touched so much pitch already, there was no point spoiling the ship for another ha’porth of the filthy stuff. So he fell in with the tactics which Jaques had suggested.

  Wednesday morning was bright and fresh. Daisy’s natural elasticity of temperament had not been destroyed by the events of the last week. Like all sanguine characters, she was revived by activity: it made her seem more real to herself, in full possession of herself again. Now she was doing something for Hugo, and happy. She knew there were dangers attached to this enterprise: but, if anything, the knowledge braced her. Never an easy prey for doubts or suspicions, she was not at all disquieted by the smoothness with which she had got away from Jacko’s house and from London.

  Houses, trees, fields whisked past the carriage window. Every telegraph pole was bringing her nearer to Hugo. Her thoughts so tenderly strained towards him that she felt he must know in his heart she was coming. It did not even matter so terribly that this time she would not see him: there was only room for one sensation in her mind—the sense of getting nearer and nearer.

  At Stenford, the last stop before Southbourne, she alighted. There, outside the station, Jacko’ was waiting for her. He gave her a gay, confidential wink and took her arm. Everything was going beautifully. They had a cup of coffee, then walked to a garage where they hired a car to take them the remaining five miles to Southbourne. As they approached the town, a little cloud came over Daisy’s mind. She was remembering the last time she and Hugo had gone to the beach: an unlaid ghost was awaiting her there, and she knew she must face it alone.

  “I want to go down on the beach by myself first,” she whispered to Jacko. “You hang about for a few minutes.”

  A few hundred yards from the bandstand, they stopped the taxi. Jacko paid off the driver and helped Daisy out.

  “We’ll meet again presently, then,” he said.

  Daisy, her bright hair concealed by a head-scarf, moved off along the promenade with the brilliant, unseeing eyes of a woman going to an assignation. Jacko lit a cigarette, gazed leisurely for a while towards the harbour wall, then strolled after her. A stalwart young man, in flannel trousers and an open-necked shirt, who was vigorously inhaling the sea air nearby, decided that he too would stroll along in the direction of the bandstand, and followed Jacko.

  Daisy moved carefully down the steps on to the beach. There were a few late holiday-makers about, enjoying the crisp October sunlight. With her shopping bag and head-scarf she looked like a holiday-maker too. It was just here, she thought, bravely scrutinising the pebbly expanse beneath the sea wall. Hugo said, “Shall I make love to you, darling?” A phrase from a hymn, heard long ago in the village church, sang through her head. “My pillow a stone.” And suddenly the ghost was exorcised. What had happened here was horrible no longer. Stretching herself out where they had lain, she felt nothing but the remembered warmth of his arms, his lips, his body half covering hers. For a timeless moment, she forgot that she was alone and what she had come here to do.

  Presently her fingers, as if of their own volition, began to prod and poke among the stones: but her mind felt no urgency yet—it was occupied with Hugo, and basking in the delight of a memory which had miraculously become pure, shedding its anxiety and shame. The open-shirted young man, leaning on the esplanade railings, caught an expression on her face, when she chanced to look up in his direction, so purely beautiful, so ecstatic that he was reminded of some poems he had been made to read at school—what were they called?—Songs of Innocence: they would make sense to him now, he found himself thinking. Innocence! And this was the mistress, maybe the accomplice, of the man who had shot poor old Stone! The young man moved away a little. He felt, irrationally, that he had no right to be witnessing the scene: but his training mastered his feelings with no great difficulty, and he continued to keep Daisy under observation.

  Jacko descended the steps. The girl’s face was growing anxious, as she turned over the stones more hurriedly.

  “Can’t you find it?” he asked. “Are you sure this is the place?”

  “Yes, I know it was here. Just about here.”

  How could she possibly forget that? But, even in a few square yards of beach, there were so many stones.

  “How deep was it?” Jacko asked in a low voice.

  “About up to my wrist. A little deeper perhaps.” She remembered the feel of the big stones and then the shingle beneath them. She gazed desperately around, as if trying to recognise one stone amongst the multitude, and her hands began to move feverishly. Jacko’s impatient look flustered her.

  “Lost something, dear?”

  A young woman with a child had approached them, unheard by Daisy in her agitation.

  “N-no. It’s nothing—” she began.

  Jacko cut in smoothly, “My spectacle case. I may have mislaid it here yesterday. Always leaving it about.”

  “Now, Des
mond,” said the young woman. “You help this lady and gentleman.”

  The little boy gripped his spade and attacked the beach with frantic enthusiasm.

  “Oh, please don’t bother,” said Daisy faintly.

  “No trouble at all, dear. He likes it. Desmond’s a great one for digging.”

  “Are you quite sure—?” Jacko said, and began to ransack Daisy’s shopping-bag, from which, by neat legerdemain, he presently produced a spectacle case he’d just slipped into it out of his own pocket, and held it up triumphantly. “It was there all the time. You just don’t look for things properly, Daisy.”

  After mutual civilities and congratulations, the woman led her child off, to sit down against the sea wall twenty yards away. Daisy stared miserably at Jacko. “We can’t, go on looking now.”

  Jacko, resourceful as ever, strolled down the beach, built up a cairn of stones and returned. He began to pick up pebbles and throw them at it, then bigger stones. The nightmare was moving in on Daisy again. Thousands of stones where she and Hugo had lain: how much of the beach would they have to throw at that cairn before they found the gun? She’d never thought it would be so difficult. And Jacko was looking peevish, throwing the stones more and more viciously.

  “You must have got the wrong place,” he said. “We’re just wasting our time.”

  After a pause, Daisy muttered, “D’you think?—Perhaps it’s not here any more.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous! If the police had found it, it’d be all over the newspapers.”

  Jacko was getting bored. For a moment he wondered if the girl had been deceiving him, playing some crazy game of her own: it was a thought which would inevitably come to a mind so tortuous as his. But a glance at her face, cold with despair, reassured him. Well, the police would know where to look now: there was no point protracting the farce.

  “We’d better be going, Daisy. It’s a wash-out, I’m afraid.”

  “Do you think Hugo might have come back here and taken it away, before he was arrested?”