Verdict of Twelve
Page 20
“What do you mean by that? How can you say such a thing? What knowledge have you of murder? How do you know” (his voice rose into a high key) “what would drive a woman to kill, and what would hold her back from that awful crime? Answer me that!” He half got up from his seat and jabbed with his finger at her. He felt rising again one of those long-forgotten angers that he had had before he had seen the light. But this time it was not an earthly and a sinful rage: he was on the work of the Almighty, and he must not let himself be frustrated. In a slightly milder but none the less fierce voice he repeated the phrase which had sounded effective when he said it:
“What knowledge have you of murder?”
Victoria flinched visibly. She could deal with most things, but this wild man, with his staring fish eyes and his nasty talk about religion, like the old chaplain, scared her proper. He looked half-mad, and loonies knew a lot of things by instinct. Him there jabbing his finger at her and asking what she knew about murder, in that suggestive way! He couldn’t know anything. All that was over long ago. But suppose he did! You never knew with loonies. Victoria felt herself begin to perspire and had a strong wish to get out of the limelight as quickly as possible. What did this woman matter one way or the other after all?
She dabbed her mouth with her handkerchief and after a few seconds was able to speak.
“Well, I don’t suppose I know anything, if you put it that way,” she said grudgingly. “I only meant—oh, well, it doesn’t matter. If you’re all agreed, I won’t stand out.”
“Thank you, Miss Atkins.” Mr. Popesgrove’s tone was respectful, and grave. “I think we are agreed. Are we not? May I record a vote of Not guilty?”
“Not guilty,” repeated the jurors in various tones and irregular time.
Part IV
Postscript
“Let me drive you to your hotel,” said Sir Ikey to Rosalie with his usual exaggeratedly deep bow. “And perhaps I can give you a lift too, Henderson?”
Mr. Henderson accepted briefly, but Rosalie simpered with only half-feigned embarrassment. “It’s too kind of you, Sir Isambard; after being so good to me and just really saving my life and me being so difficult, it’s really more than you should trouble to, really it is.” (She pronounced her favourite adverb as usual, as if it were spelt with a double ee.) “You see the fact is, me being taken up so suddenly, and then being in there ever since, I’ve not exactly got a place to go to. Even if I wanted to go back to the house after all that’s passed, which I wouldn’t, I couldn’t start going there at this time of night.”
“We must find you an hotel, dear lady. How stupid of me.” Sir Ikey reproached himself in the key of a very large funeral bell. “I expect you will prefer a quiet one.”
“Yes,” said Rosalie, pleased to have her feelings appreciated. “Like the Regent Palace.”
“So be it,” Sir Ikey began to say, but Mr. Henderson intervened. “The Regent Palace is rather bright and crowded; I think you would like somewhere more quiet,” he affirmed.
Rosalie was still used to being given instructions: she had not yet realized she was free. “Yes, Mr. Henderson,” she agreed dutifully and thought for a minute. “There’s an hotel called the Great Northern at King’s Cross: do you think we could go there? It’s awfully quiet and is right by the trains. I do like trains: always have done since I was a kid.”
“Why, certainly,” said Sir Ikey, gave an order, and his big car moved smoothly off.
For several minutes Rosalie said nothing whatever. Then with the suddenness of a child falling into water she spoke.
“There’s something I ought to tell you. Two things, really, I suppose. I’ve been worrying for a long time whether I shouldn’t tell you, one way and another: but I decided not to, and, of course, it’s been all right in the end. Of course, I know you ought to tell everything to the lawyers, but I hope Mr. Henderson won’t mind me saying that he’s, well, he’s just the tiniest bit stuffy, and as this might be looked on badly by some people, in the end I said to myself least said soonest mended and that was all.
“Well, I don’t seem to be able to get anything out, do I? Just say what you’ve got to say and be done with it: that’s always best, I know. But there.”
She paused in obvious embarrassment. Sir Ikey’s monocle was glinting in the passing lights of the shops; his face was in darkness but he appeared amused. Mr. Henderson felt that he knew what novelists meant when they write “His heart turned to stone in his breast.” He was afraid he was about to hear the particular confession which was the thing he least wanted to hear in the world. He had a highly disagreeable constricting pain in his chest.
Rosalie at last went on.
“Well, first there’s that Essex paper—the cutting, you know. I did know about it because I ordered it, but as the newsagent couldn’t remember there was no point in mentioning it, was there? It was just like Mr. Proudie said: I saw the story in the Daily Mail which only had a short bit about it, and I said to myself, ‘Well, that is a queer do; I’d like to read more about that.’ I always was very fond of reading about crimes, you see, and every month I’d go into Exeter and get the Illustrated Police News, four issues all together, and a pile of those nice American magazines—they knew to keep for me Peppy Detective which is the nicest, but I like Peek too—but I wouldn’t order them from Wrackhampton through Rodd, because it’s not at all a good example for the servants, and, in any case, those two were very much above themselves and thought themselves as good as me, and it wasn’t so easy keeping them in their places with Sir Henry’s will being what it was, and I did not like them to know I read that sort of paper, not that there’s any harm in it, but they were only too ready to presume. I had trouble getting rid of them, the books I mean, at first, but after a while I used to cut out the more exciting bits that I felt like keeping and burn the rest down the garden in the incinerator. Well, now, I was explaining about this Essex paper: I said to myself ‘I’d like to read more about that, I would,’ and the right idea came to me very quickly, and I said, ‘I know where there’ll be a full account, of course; in the local paper.’ When I was in London, in South Belgravia you know, we all—my friends and I—used to read the local paper, the Pimlico and Something News, I think it was, because of the police news in it: twopennorth of other people’s troubles, we used to call it. But that was easy said, only I didn’t know what the Essex local paper was, and I wasn’t sure where to find out, but then I remembered the Free, that is, the library, I mean: it’s got a reference library too and I went into the room and I said to the young lady there, ‘Excuse me, miss, but can you tell me how to find about local papers?’ and she said, ‘Local papers, ma’m?’ and I said, ‘Yes, to know what is the local paper for different places, you know,’ and she said I should look at a thing called Willing’s Press Guide and there it was in it, all quite clear. The paper was a weekly so it was quite easy to know what day to get. Well, I saw at once I couldn’t get it in Exeter that day, so I thought why not order it through the man in Wrackhampton? After all, there’s nothing wrong in ordering a local paper. So I did, and I cut out the interesting thing in it and burnt the rest.
“And as for how it got in that book, really I don’t know. You can’t remember everything after a year, can you? I expect that what you said to me was right, only you didn’t know it was me. I must have been reading it one day and someone came in and I shut it quickly up in a book—maybe it was Philip came in and I didn’t want him to see me reading anything morbid, or maybe it was one of the Rodds with their spying ways. Anyway, I forgot all about it until I saw that the police had found it, and it did give me a proper turn.”
Mr. Henderson sighed his relief. This was nothing like what he had feared. In fact, it was hardly anything of importance. But Sir Ikey would not leave well alone.
“I think you said that you had two things to tell us, Mrs. van Beer,” he said. Gloom settled on Mr. Henderson again.
“Yes, I have; and it’s really quite difficult to know how to put it. I’ve felt quite uncomfortable, I have, really quite often, with you working so hard at it and me knowing all about all of it all the time. You see, I know just exactly what did happen, and quite often I’ve wondered whether I oughtn’t to say so. I do hope you won’t think it was impolite of me?”
Mr. Henderson began to say, “It is quite unnecessary—” but he was boomed down.
“Impolite? Indeed not.” If a raven smiles, it smiles as Sir Ikey did. “But I think both of us would like to know just what did happen.”
“Why, I thought any one would guess. I went out in the garden before lunch, and so did Philip, but we didn’t go together. And when I looked back I saw him scooping something up with his hands on the brick path, where the ivy dust falls. I said to myself, ‘I wonder what that child is doing?’ and just then he slips back into the dining-room holding something in his hands. So, I stopped and thought for a minute, and I said to myself again, ‘I wonder if he’s been reading about ivy dust and knows it’s poison,’ and so I walk back to the house, not hurrying or doing anything unusual, you see, so as not to let on if he was watching.
“And then I went into the dining-room, and there it was; I was quite right. The salad dressing was all full of gritty ivy dust sort of stirred in. Stirred in by someone’s dirty finger, I daresay. ‘Well,’ I said to myself, ‘that’s the game, is it? Poisoning your aunt, Master Philip.’ I thought a touch of his own medicine wouldn’t do him any harm, so I stirred it in a little more thoroughly—I’m glad Ada didn’t notice me doing that!—and said nothing about it. And we both ate it for lunch. However, after that I thought that it was foolish to take any risks and I went upstairs and put my finger down my throat and never felt any the worse for it.”
The total silence which greeted this narrative rather took Rosalie aback. She felt that perhaps she might need to offer some further explanation.
“I thought it best to say nothing till now because—well, because people are so queer and unfair. Of course, the way it is, Philip killed himself, and you can’t say anything else. But some people are so narrow-minded that they’d say me letting him eat it wasn’t any better than murder. I really believe they would.”
“You’re quite right, Mrs. van Beer,” said Sir Ikey. “Some people are so narrow-minded I really believe they would. And this, I think, is your hotel.”
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