Waiting for Willa

by Dorothy Eden

“The police rang the embassy. Peter says the ambassador is in a state. It’s so awful, after Bill Jordan. Peter’s had to be questioned for hours, because she was his secretary. But that’s all I know!”

  “You must know more. What do the police think?”

  “Suicide, of course. She was pregnant, and the man’s let her down. This Gustav has let her down. Grace, I can hear the children coming in. I really have to go.”

  The telephone clicked, and Grace sat down, slowly and carefully, as if she had grown old and brittle-boned.

  Willa dead. No, it wasn’t true. Not silly, noisy, impulsive, gregarious Willa, trusting everyone, ready for anything. Maybe Wilhelmina, with her silent cry of desperation, could die. Because she had loved her mysterious Gustav, and he had failed her, and she couldn’t face having his child alone. The Swedes wouldn’t find the suicide of a young woman in that condition too surprising. Pathetic, unfortunate, and unnecessary, but not suspicious.

  Whereas Willa, with her canary hair, her gaiety, was incapable of taking her own life. Grace knew that. She wondered if she would be able to convince the police of this fact when they came.

  She was still sitting in the same position, rigid, in a state of shock, when the telephone rang again.

  “Grace,” said Peter Sinclair in a quiet, dull voice Grace hardly recognized, “has Kate told you?”

  “Yes, but I don’t believe it.”

  “You’ll have to, I’m afraid. Ĩ just wanted to warn you, the police will be asking you to go to Uppsala to identify the body.”

  “Uppsala,” she said stupidly. Where Polsen had been on Saturday, looking at the dead queens in the cathedral. Now the very name had a sinister sound.

  “That’s where they’ve taken her. I’m sorry. Do you think you can face it?”

  “If I have to.”

  “Good girl. You’re a bloody marvel. You sound so calm. Do you want me to come with you?”

  “No, thank you.” Of course, she sounded calm. How could she speak with animation when she was filled with ice? “If anyone comes, it must be Polsen.”

  “Polsen!” She thought Peter sounded affronted. What did that matter? No one but Polsen had listened to her forebodings about Willa; no one else had cared. So why should Peter begin to care now, except for the very important reason that there was another scandal to be hushed up?

  “Are you sure, Grace?”

  “That he’ll come? Of course he will.”

  “Well, then—I admit I don’t relish such a grisly task. By the way, if you see the children, Kate and I want it kept from them. And what are you going to tell the police?”

  “Everything, of course.”

  “Not all this tarradiddle about Willa’s belongings dropped around, and the kids saying she was on the telephone the other day, and the old chap with a key getting into your flat.”

  “Chap? How old-fashioned Peter was sounding with his “tarradiddle.”

  “Well, of course, he was a chap. When did Willa have girlfriends?” Peter’s voice was rough with tension. “Be a bit circumspect, Grace, or the ambassador won’t like it.”

  “It’s a pity about the ambassador!”

  “We don’t want to be another Bonn.”

  “Your precious reputation!” Grace burst out. “Is that all you’re thinking of?”

  “And Willa’s. Which could do with a little bit of a whitewash, if you must know.”

  Grace hadn’t thought Peter could be so callous. Perhaps that was a characteristic that came out in all good diplomats when the side was threatened. Form a square; fall back on your ranks; never mind sacrificing the unimportant innocent for the bigger cause.

  For Willa was an innocent, whatever everybody said.

  And now she was dead. One had to keep probing at that hard cold stone of knowledge in one’s heart. And come to the inevitable decision.

  “If you must know, Peter,” she said, “I don’t for one minute believe this is suicide. So I still intend to give the police all the evidence I have, including Willa’s diary.”

  She had startled him then. She heard his indrawn breath.

  “You never told me anything about finding a diary.”

  “No. That was in the days when I was being discreet,” Grace said, without humor.

  “What’s in it? Anything significant?”

  “I think so. Tell the ambassador.”

  She hung up. She was suddenly deadly tired. She could visualize Peter’s indignant face, his eyes slightly protruding, his mouth hard as she had seen it when he was angry with his wife. His merry-boy charm had another personality behind it. Naturally. He wouldn’t be in his present job without the ability to present a completely unemotional front when necessary.

  But at this minute Grace couldn’t forgive him for not being on Willa’s side. Let him sweat over what he must now be imagining were her scandalous secrets in the diary.

  For Willa was dead, and she, Grace, had to go and look at what was now called simply “the body” and write to her father and arrange about a funeral and get rid of that wardrobe full of clothes.

  Did any of those stiff-upper-lipped people at the embassy give a thought to the agony of these things?

  Chapter 12

  THE TWO POLICEMEN, THE officer and the sergeant, sat in the front of the car, Polsen and herself in the back. The police had been more than willing for Polsen to come. They spoke English, but without a wide vocabulary. Herr Polsen would be useful as an interpreter. There were a great many questions to be asked, even if, as seemed likely, the cause of death was suicide by drowning. And it was easy enough to drown in this cold weather. One had only to fall in the lake accidentally, and one would be frozen to death within minutes.

  Polsen asked, in a pedantic, schoolmasterish way, how long the body had been immersed and was told that it was probably one or two days. It was not thought that the death fall, or whatever it had been, had taken place at Sigtuna. It was too populated a spot, with schoolchildren or fishermen or visitors from the city always wandering about at the lake’s edge. The body must have floated a distance in the storm. There was the possibility it had fallen overboard from a boat. But that supposition was untenable unless one were to begin thinking in terms of murder, which was scarcely in anyone’s mind. The young lady was four to five months pregnant. If every man murdered the girl he got in the family way, there wouldn’t be enough police or enough prisons in the country.

  The two policemen, with their cropped fair heads and thick pink necks, laughed jovially. Drowning wasn’t so bad, one of them said. Better than the mutilated death a great many people met in car smashes.

  Polsen sat hunched in his corner of the seat, making no attempt to touch Grace reassuringly or even to smile at her. He had been like that ever since they had picked him up at the university. He was deeply shocked by the news, but somehow not surprised. Definitely not surprised. Now there was no reading the expression in his blank eyes, his withdrawn face.

  He hadn’t expected to be in Uppsala again so soon, Grace thought. Or had he?

  They couldn’t talk while those two guardians of the law sat in the front seat. Grace said that Fru Lindstrom was looking after the canary. Cage birds liked company, and even Fru Lindstrom, temporarily shocked into speechlessness by the tragedy, would be better than nobody. The Misses Morgensson had not been told. Why distress such old ladies? And their nephew Axel’s ship had sailed at noon. For some reason the police had taken the trouble to establish that fact.

  The reaction of the Von Sturpes, the Backes, Winifred Wright, and others would come later. In the meantime, a thin green church spire on the skyline indicated that Uppsala was near. There were crows swinging low in the sky, squawking, and along the banks of the canal, hatted and overcoated Swedes, solemnly strolling. A bitter wind blew down the narrow streets. Opposite the cathedral and the university buildings there was the inevitable cemetery, the motionless, dark, tall trees and the frozen gravestones.

  And in a square, hygienic, ugly room, Willa, fr
ozen too, finally silent.

  There was a chance to talk to Polsen after all. Grace was aware that she must have looked almost as ghastly as what she had had to gaze on, in that horrible silent little room, for one of the police suggested that Polsen take her for some coffee at a café down the street. The sergeant could drop them there and pick them up in half an hour or so. It was an ordeal doing this sort of thing for the first time. Or for any number of times, if it came to that. One never quite got used to it, especially when the victim was young.

  At first Grace thought the coffee would make her sick. She held the warm liquid in her mouth and determined to swallow it, but slowly. She couldn’t be sick in front of Polsen, in this nice clean café with its view of the canal. It must be a charming view in summer, when the slow-flowing water sparkled and the overhanging trees were green. The houses along the opposite bank were old and dignified, with long flights of steps and interesting doorways. The scene would have been Parisian if there had been more color and sunshine. But the sluggish black water reflected the gray sky. The floating yellow leaves, dropped from the overhanging birches, heightened the melancholy.

  Looking at the water made Grace think of that dreadful, swollen, sodden face and the hair from which all the canary color had been washed. She took another valiant swallow of coffee and said. “It’s all right, Polsen. I’m not going to disgrace you.”

  “How could you do that?”

  At last he touched her hand, taking it in his and holding it in his lap. She shivered violently.

  “I’m frozen. That lake water must have been icy. Polsen, she wouldn’t have killed herself. Because that would have killed the baby, and it was the baby she was holding out for. Otherwise, she’d have had an abortion when it was offered, wouldn’t she?”

  “Was it offered?”

  “It must have been. It would have saved Gustav getting that divorce that I’m sure he didn’t want. Wouldn’t it?”

  “You keep asking me. I don’t know.”

  “You know well enough. Gustav is a rat, and we’ve got to find him. I’ve given the police Willa’s diary.”

  “So I hear.” The briefness of Polsen’s answer made her say,

  “Do you object, too?”

  “Why should I? Who does?”

  “The embassy. At least Peter Sinclair felt he had to, as its spokesman. Well, they might have been able to claim diplomatic immunity with Bill Jordan, but they can’t with Willa since she was no longer a member of the staff. So they’ll just have to make the best of the publicity.”

  “It won’t be more than a day’s sensation,” Polsen said. “Not even that. A girl taking her life because she’s pregnant and unhappy and deserted. It happens all the time.”

  “But that isn’t how it happened this time. Gustav will tell us. When we find him.”

  “That’s up to the police now, isn’t it? After all, it isn’t a crime to make a girl pregnant.”

  “No, but it is to drown her,” Grace said so vehemently that the woman behind the counter stared at them, blinking her pale lashes.

  “You’re jumping to conclusions, Grace. Your mind is more logical than this. Have another cup of coffee. We have time.”

  “I’m not myself anymore,” Grace muttered. “I’ve begun to think like Willa. Ever since I wore her clothes and put on her scent. I’ve got illogical and liable to act on hunches. Impulsive. Irrational, perhaps. Perhaps not. Perhaps I’m really myself without knowing it.” She rubbed her eyes wearily. “I might end up in Lake Mälaren, too, mightn’t I?”

  “Grace, don’t be crazy! You must go back to England.”

  “Before the winter madness gets me? As it’s getting Kate Sinclair. Peter, too, a bit, I think. And it must have got Willa sometime ago. All that Gothic stuff she wrote in her diary.”

  “Willa had an undisciplined imagination, and you have a disciplined one.” Whatever storm was going on in Grace’s head, Polsen was keeping his customary quiet honest good sense. “For instance, instead of talking about a king with two queens in that roundabout way, wouldn’t you have said simply that Gustav has two wives, and one has to be got rid of before the other one can be happy?”

  Grace looked at him, her eyes wide.

  “But, Polsen, that’s it! Now I realize! Willa was the wife to be got rid of, not the one to be saved!”

  The police said it was unfortunate that no one seemed to know where Willa had been living just prior to her death. They were inclined to dismiss the diary, all that nonsense about “the rain on the roof and the dark forest” as fanciful. And as for the unidentified Gustav looking like a portrait in Gripsholm Castle, a great many Swedes had similar characteristics, blue eyes, blond hair, thick lips. Nevertheless, they would make a search. The dead girl’s possessions must be somewhere. Her handbag, for instance. Did Grace and Polsen know that a woman seldom jumped in a lake with her handbag. Some careful instinct, preserved even at that desperate moment, made her leave it safely on the bank.

  But they had not yet ascertained where the tragedy had happened. The investigation might take some time. The lake was very large.

  The only items of any value that Willa had been wearing were a gold wristwatch and a ring. The ring was lapis lazuli with an intricate antique gold setting. Did Grace know anything about it?

  “Only what the girls at the embassy told me,” Grace answered. “They said that Gustav—the man she ran off with—had given it to her. I don’t know whether he had bought it in Stockholm. It might have been in his family. It was old, the girls said.”

  “Ja,” said the men. That was all.

  In Willa’s flat nothing had visibly altered. Only the sense of waiting and expectation was gone. Grace said good-night to Polsen on the doorstep. She had to put a telephone call through to her father, an ordeal she dreaded almost as much as the trip to Uppsala. She also, sooner or later, had to go through Willa’s things, make a decision about the funeral, write to Willa’s friends.

  The nightmare evening turned into a real nightmare when Grace tried to sleep. She tossed and turned and then, in a light sleep, dreamed that Willa was trying to push her out of the pretty Gustav III bed, saying that that was her bed; she wanted to come back.

  Her skin prickling with horror, Grace leaped out of bed and out of the flat, running up the stairs in her nightgown. She rattled at Polsen’s door, found it unlocked, and burst into the dark room, groping her way to Polsen’s bed.

  “Let me come in,” she whispered. “I’m scared. I hate being alone.”

  The bedclothes were thrown back, and his arm pulled her in beside him. He held her face against his breast, his chin pressing into her hair.

  “I wasn’t asleep either,” he said in a warm grumble.

  “It’s enough that Willa’s alone tonight. Not us.”

  “I agree. Not us.”

  Gradually Grace stopped shivering. She realized that Polsen slept naked. The skin of his chest was smooth and hairless. His heart beat with a slow, steady thud beneath her cheekbone. She liked feeling that; it was so strong and reassuring; it would go on forever.

  Presently he said, “Haven’t you too many clothes on?”

  Silently she sat up and pulled her nightgown over her head, then slid down into the narrow bed, her heart beating against his.

  “Grace?”

  “Yes, Polsen. Please!”

  Deftly and tenderly his big body covered hers. And it was right, because the nightmare stopped. The blood was singing in her veins; she was alive, alive, alive. And somewhere Willa was laughing.

  “Fancy you, Grace.”

  She laughed herself, although the sound was more like a sob, and fell asleep, wrapped in Polsen’s arms.

  When she awoke, the arms had gone. She was alone in the bed, but there was a pleasant smell of coffee, and Polsen was saying, “Breakfast is ready. How do you like your coffee?”

  “With milk, please.”

  He handed her her nightgown.

  “Not that I don’t like you like that, bu
t it’s a cold morning. Today I believe it really will snow.”

  “Polsen—”

  He had his back to her as he stood at the table, pouring coffee.

  “Yes? But if you’re going to talk about last night, this isn’t the time.”

  She nodded. He was right, as he usually was. He knew she was the kind to explain, to interpret, even to apologize. She might even begin to think that the reason for her behavior was that Willa had been getting inside her again, and that would be disastrous.

  “Polsen, I think I love you,” she said.

  That seemed safe enough, for he looked pleased.

  “You only think? That’s my sober Grace.”

  Not Willa. Thank heaven. He hadn’t been thinking it a Willa thing last night.

  “Well, do you love me? Polsen?”

  “I told you this isn’t the time to have this kind of conversation. There are too many things involved. But if you’re asking, was I happy last night, I was. Now don’t let your coffee get cold. By the way, I’ve arranged not to go back to the university this week, so anything I can do, I will be available.”

  But what was there to do except answer the telephone? Grace listened to her father’s voice, incongruously from a peaceful Suffolk village.

  “Grace, I simply didn’t take in what you told me last night. Is this terrible thing about Willa true?”

  “I saw her, Daddy, I told you.”

  “Good God! It’s unbelievable. Do you want me to fly over?”

  “No, no, you mustn’t dream of it. Everything’s under control.”

  “What about the embassy? Won’t they be upset?”

  “They are, of course, but it’s not as if Willa were still on the staff. Don’t worry, Daddy. They’ll look after me.”

  “Then when are you coming home?”

  “When we’ve found Gustav.”

  “Who the devil’s he?”

  “Willa’s lover. The one who got her in this fix.”

  “Well, he’d better face the music, hadn’t he?”

  But that’s the last thing murderers do, Grace said to herself as she put the telephone down. Gustav wasn’t likely to face any music or to come out from the shelter of his anonymity.