Scared to Death

by Anne Morice

  “Well, prevention of crime may be among them, although I’m not too confident of that. We may already be too late; but I’ll tell you one thing for certain.”

  “Oh, do!”

  “Even if we are too late, this may yet prove to be the unique occasion when the hunt is on before the crime has been discovered.”

  In a sense, things turned out better than that because, although the criminal was unaware of it, the hunt was indeed up before the crime had been discovered. On the other hand, after it had been there was still some delay in settling the score, since for a time it appeared that no outside agency had been involved and the only violence inflicted by the victim’s own hand.

  It was daylight before Camilla was found, crushed against an inner arch of the bridge, where her clothing had been caught and held by rusty iron nails, although it was reckoned that she had been drowned some hours earlier. In the ensuing police enquiries some curious admissions were made and unknown facts brought to light, some more startling than others, but all contributing to incontrovertible evidence of suicide.

  It was not until the pathologist’s report had been made public at the inquest and various other witnesses had spoken up, that sufficient of the truth became known to leave the jury with no alternative but to return a verdict of wilful murder.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  “It is always as well to take note of such little human oddities as may crop up,” I remarked with a touch of complacency. “As I once told you, Robin, however insignificant each may appear on its own, they sometimes add up to a formidable whole. For example, if I had not already noted the fact that he was left-handed, I am sure it would never have occurred to me that it was Bernard concealed inside the motor cyclist disguise. But for that, I daresay the episode would have made no lasting impression and he would now be sunning himself in Scotland, or whatever it is they do there.”

  “I hate to give credit where credit is due,” Toby admitted. “It seems so unenterprising somehow, but I am forced to agree that it was rather perceptive of you to have discovered he was left-handed when, to the best of my knowledge, you only met him once and that was at a race meeting.”

  “Once was enough,” I replied, “and the surroundings immaterial. If you will now both hold out your right hands, I will show you how it is done.”

  Toby obeyed at once and after a moment Robin, smiling because he had guessed what was coming, followed suit.

  “You see?” I explained. “Two right hands, two wrists, no watches! Each of you wears one, of course, but you are both right-handed. A left-handed man does it the other way round. The first and only time I met Bernard he was wearing a very gaudy, expensive looking watch. He was also wearing a very old and dowdy looking hat. He was proud of one, but ashamed of the other and he raised his hand in such an ostentatious manner that I was bound to notice the watch. I also noticed that he was wearing it on his right hand, so there we were!”

  “Where?”

  “Nowhere at the time, naturally. I understand that roughly one quarter of the population is left-handed, so there was nothing sensational about Bernard being one of them. Nevertheless, it was his undoing because when he appeared so dramatically from underneath the grandstand he made the identical gesture, although it was the reverse of deliberate that time. I happened to be watching his hands most particularly and, as soon as he did that, I hadn’t any doubt of his identity, or that he was up to something shady. There was nothing clever about the last bit either. People don’t dress up as yobbos and crawl about under grandstands unless they are up to something shady.”

  “And why was he there, in any case? Wouldn’t it have been wiser to have kept away?”

  “Well, he had to get back to his bike, didn’t he, Toby? He’d have looked rather eccentric without one and, besides, he needed it to get as far away from home territory as possible before worse things than fireworks began to explode and, above all, before he was recognised. Obviously, he would have parked his bike in the least conspicuous place available, which was among a whole lot of others in the car park, but unfortunately the only way back to it would have taken him past the entrance gate and we know that the attendant held a slightly prejudiced view of the goggles and helmet brigade. At the very least, his presence and provenance would have been observed, to the extent that it might have been worthwhile making a note of the registration number when he went by on the bike two minutes later. By taking pains not to alert him in advance, I expect Bernard hoped to slip through the net.”

  “Having already lured Camilla down to the river and thrown her in, I take it? What a detestable young man! I have always disliked him and I see now that my instinct was right. Camilla may have been irritating, but she scarcely deserved that.”

  “As it happened, your view of him erred on the side of charity,” Robin said. “The evidence shows that he rowed her upstream for some distance above the bridge and then not only threw her in, but held her under. And he must have spun quite a story, moreover, to have induced her to leave the party and accompany him on such a jaunt.”

  “If we had only been able to listen in to that telephone call from Scotland,” I remarked. “We might have some idea of what kind of story it was. Probably something about having got himself embroiled with the other young woman and needing Camilla’s help to get disembroiled again.”

  “Would she really have fallen for such a fatuous tale?”

  “Oh yes, so long as it flattered her vanity, and there’s no denying that capering about on moonlight assignations, whatever their purpose, would have seemed a lot more romantic than the role of cast-off glove. If I were to moralise, I should probably say now that people mainly get into trouble through their own weaknesses.”

  “I hope you won’t then, for I should regard it as most inappropriate,” Toby said. “I have one or two weaknesses myself, some might say, but I had not envisaged having to pay for them with my life.”

  “And, in any case, I hadn’t intended to moralise this time because it wasn’t really her fault that she was murdered. No doubt her vanity and self-deception made the job easier, but a way would have been found somehow. The cards were stacked against her from the start, the stacker in chief, of course, being Helena.”

  “Implying that she put Bernard up to it?” Robin asked.

  “Oh no, nothing so tasteless as that, but she did create the circumstances and she did bring him up to worship money. As we heard at the inquest, Camilla was pregnant and she’d reneged on their agreement by falling in love with him, so was all set to make one hell of a stink if he’d abandoned her, I suppose we can’t exactly blame Helena for that, but I don’t consider that any of it, on its own, would have been sufficient incentive for murder. The trouble was that, with Camilla dead, Bernard was not only free to marry his Scottish manicurist, but he could do so with a dowry of something up to a hundred thousand pounds, which I feel sure was the driving motive. All that talk of scratching a living off twenty barren acres was just rot. It was the money he was after.”

  “And you hold Helena responsible for that?”

  “Certainly, I do. The minute Edna died Helena set about getting Camilla into her clutches and one of her first moves was to persuade her to make a will. Naturally, since they were about to be married, she left everything to Bernard.”

  “Are you sure?” Robin asked. “I don’t remember anything being said about that at the inquest.”

  “No, but I bet it will come out at the trial. I happened to hear of it from Tilly. She was quite shocked by what she called the morbidity, so obviously it wasn’t she who persuaded Camilla, and that only leaves Helena. To give her her due, I’m sure she genuinely believed at the time that they were going to be married, but that’s all I will give her. She was a murderess too, in her own very special cunning way; and Marge was quite right in saying that Bernard took after her. They were two of a kind all right.”

  “And that didn’t come out at the inquest either, so far as I was aware.”

  �
�No, she got away with it, but I don’t see that we need to tear our hearts out over that. It was a cruel trick to play on silly old Edna, but she didn’t gain anything by it and the gods sent her far worse retribution than we could ever have dreamt of.”

  “How did you catch on that Bella was Helena?” Robin asked.

  “There were so many clues from so many different sources that it’s hard to know exactly. Helena herself provided quite a number. For such a calculating woman, it was really surprising how often she slipped up. Like, for instance, the brazen way she told me that she knew nothing about these strange and ridiculous hallucinations. She and Tilly were as thick as thieves, so she must have heard about them. The fact that she lied meant nothing much at the time, but it was worth noting; and her second big mistake was much more damning. It was when she was telling me about the hairdressers at Stourbury. Incidentally, I expect they were the people who made up the Edna wig, to Helena’s very exact specifications, naturally; although I hadn’t an inkling of that when I questioned her. I was simply flying kites, to try either to establish or demolish Tilly’s alibi for the afternoon when the first apparition turned up on the race course, and the weird thing was that Helena clutched at it as a chance to provide one for herself. She told me she was having her hair tinted that afternoon, but, according to Tilly, she only went in for five minutes to arrange about displaying one of the Festival posters and, by then, I thought I knew which of them was likely to be lying.”

  “Yes, but that still hasn’t answered the question as to how you knew she was Bella.”

  “Well, there was something faintly familiar about those names Edna invented for her characters. For a long time I couldn’t pin it down, but it was actually a kind of cipher and Alice’s friend, Marian, finally decoded it for me. She explained that as a girl Edna had been almost neurotically stage and film struck, and also that she’d once played the lead in the school play. Now lend me your pen for a minute, Robin, and I’ll give you both another visual exercise.”

  He did so and I wrote down a list of names in three separate columns, explaining as I went along that the first gave the real names, the second Edna’s inventions and the third providing, where necessary, the connecting link. When I had finished it looked like this:

  “The first thing to hit me,” I said, handing the sheet of paper across to them, “was that Benny wasn’t short for Benjamin, it was her private name for her first husband, Jack. After that several other things fell into place, one of them concerning the wicked Fay, who had designs on Jack. When Alice was describing that set up she made it sound as though she and Edna were inseparable, with Jack as the odd man out; but of course it wasn’t so at all. Whether justifiably or not, it was Edna who felt she was gradually being pushed into that position, which was why she turned against Alice, as soon as she could afford to, and wouldn’t let her within yards of old Benjamin for fear of a repetition. It had nothing to do with Tilly’s machinations, as Alice tried to make out. Perhaps it suited her to believe that and I daresay she has now convinced even herself, but in fact I should say that Tilly was largely responsible for bringing them together again at the end of Edna’s life. And with all that to build on, I think it was safe to assume that Helena was Bella, don’t you? Incidentally, Edna called herself May, but it was she who should really have been named Matilda.”

  “Why Matilda?”

  “Wasn’t she the one who acquired such a reputation for not telling the truth that when she shrieked out that the house was on fire they only answered ‘Little Liar!’, and she was burnt to a cinder? I am now harking back to the occasion when Edna told me she had got the tip to back Bitter Aloes ‘through her grand-daughter’s fiancé’, who was a friend of the trainer. No one believed her, but it was probably a half truth because Bernard told me that Helena did know some people in that world and I expected she went to great pains to get some pretty good information lined up for Edna at that meeting, so as to be reasonably sure of getting her round to the pay-out windows after at least one race.”

  “What beats me,” Toby said, “is how she got away with it so often. I can understand pulling it off once, or even twice. That appearance in the garden, for instance, must have been relatively easy, but I would have expected even simple-minded Edna to catch on eventually.”

  “Well, I daresay she was getting brain-washed, to some extent, but the fact is that Helena didn’t get away with it every time.”

  “She didn’t?”

  “Certainly not, and we have Edna’s own words to prove it; that never, never, come hell or high water, should wicked Bella get her hands on the money. To me, that states as clearly as anything that she had seen through the plot, right down to the fact that Helena had been using the incident at the V. and A., which had been pure coincidence, to torment her in this way.”

  “Okay, so I can see that made it necessary to cut Camilla out of her will, but how about Tilly and Ferdy? Why did they have to get the same treatment?”

  “She may not always have been quite so dim as she appeared and when she said ‘Never’ she meant precisely that. Knowing Tilly, one can say that it’s extremely unlikely that she’d have walked off with fifty thousand pounds, leaving Camilla penniless. I think most of it would have found its way back to her, and so eventually to Bernard, if not during Tilly’s lifetime, certainly on her death. As for Ferdy, a backward child of three could have guessed that any legacy he received would remain in his hands for exactly as long as it took him to sign it all away again.”

  “It’s not that I wish to bring you down exactly,” Toby said, “but when I recall how often Robin and I have been pinioned here, listening to you modestly recounting your triumphant progress through the labyrinth of crime, it does give me a faint satisfaction to point out that this time you have taken the wrong turning.”

  “Oh? . . . Have I? . . . Where?”

  “If, as you insist, Edna had penetrated the disguise and knew that it was Helena who had been hounding her in this way, then the element of the unknown, which was the key part of the affair, must have been eliminated. In short, since the ghost had now been reduced to flesh and bones, how could it have subsequently returned to cause a fatal heart attack?”

  It was now my turn to grow thoughtful and I said: “I admit you have a point there, Toby, and it is one which had occurred to me too, but I think the circumstances and the grotesquerie of that last episode must cancel it out. You once assured me that if you had looked up and seen yourself walking into the room, you would have dropped dead on the spot, and I honestly believe that even if you had been ninety per cent certain that it was only some malicious person playing a vile trick on you, it would still have given you a nasty turn. Now, put yourself in the place of an elderly woman, already groggy from a series of hideous shocks, don’t forget! It’s the middle of the night and pitch dark; you don’t feel well and you’re in a hurry to get to the bathroom; in such a hurry that you don’t switch on the light. But when you open the door the bathroom is a blaze of light, which accounted for her deathbed phobia no doubt, and there, sitting on the edge of the bath, let us say, malevolently waiting for you to arrive, is yourself, fully clothed in your own mink coat and your own green velvet turban.”

  “Well . . . yes . . .” he admitted. “When you put it like that, I must admit it would have struck me as rather strange.”

  “I am positive that each of us would have keeled over and passed out, just as Edna did.”

  “How did Helena get in?” Robin asked, as though to seal up every crack in my argument. “Surely not by climbing through the bathroom window with a trunkful of Edna’s clothes?”

  “No, not at all. She walked in through the front door, after they were all in bed, and she wasn’t carrying a thing. Ferdy, who is about as wide awake as a dormouse in January told me that he only discovered that Bernard was spending his nights at Farndale because there was some rumpus over his losing the key and I’m sure we don’t need to look very far to guess who’d taken it. Moreover, Hele
na had already been to the house that evening, on what purported to be an errand of mercy. She came to borrow Tilly’s embroidery book. Tilly would have it that this was just an excuse to get Robert there to mend the vacuum cleaner, but of course it was the other way round. The excuse she was looking for was to go upstairs on her own, into the little dressing room, where Tilly keeps all her sewing things and which you’ll remember is situated between Edna’s bedroom and bathroom. And that’s precisely what she did, while Robert and Tilly were busy taking the old machine apart. Incidentally, what a broken reed Robert is! No wonder Vi and Marge despise him! He not only kept Helena informed of all developments in Edna’s last will and testament, which I am sure is most unethical, but when she began to lose her nerve all he could think of was to write me an anonymous letter, begging me to get lost. It would be nice to think he had my welfare at heart, and perhaps there was a bit of that too, but I’m afraid the fact is that Helena had learnt from Camilla that I was asking questions about someone called Bella and a certain incident at the V. and A. and was rapidly losing control.”

  “But Helena went on to the Mayor’s Ball that evening,” Robin pointed out. “And there was no mink draped over her arm when she left Farndale. At least, presumably one of the others would have noticed if there had been.”

  “No, of course there wasn’t. When she nipped upstairs she went into Edna’s bedroom and she did two things. One was to drop an emetic or whatever in the bedside carafe and the other to remove such clothes from the wardrobe as she was going to need later on and bundle them away in the dressing room. It only remained to snatch up the embroidery book and saunter downstairs again. The whole operation needn’t have taken her more than three or four minutes. Of course, it was a desperate throw, but then she’s always been a desperately ambitious and thwarted woman. Edna was getting stronger every day and it might have been only a matter of hours before the hundred thousand pounds slipped away from her darling Bernard for ever. And she was most ingenious, you know, one has to give her that. Honestly, I think we should look at tomorrow’s runners. If there’s a horse called Ingenuity, or Scheming Lady, or something like that, it could well be worth a modest plunge.”