An Impartial Witness

by Charles Todd

  “She was so distressed. Crying, in fact. I don’t think that was like her. Do you?”

  After a moment she said, “No, she wouldn’t have made a scene. Not Marjorie. But I’m afraid I can’t help you. It would be—prying. And she’s dead.”

  “This polite conspiracy of silence is all very well and good,” I pointed out, a little angry with her. “But I think Marjorie would approve of a little ‘prying’ if it meant her killer was found out.”

  Helen Calder studied my face for a moment, and then nodded. “You’re absolutely right, you know. We’ve all taken such pride in closing ranks to protect her memory. I never considered the fact that we were protecting her murderer as well. But you see, people do ask about her death, and I’ve gotten quite good at fending off gossipmongers. Heaven knows there have been enough of them. But even if I answer your questions, what possible good will it do?”

  “I myself stepped forward when there was a notice in the newspapers asking for any information about Mrs. Evanson on that last day of her life. I met with an Inspector Herbert at Scotland Yard. It was not as difficult as I’d expected.” I smiled. “Sadly, I don’t think what I told him about seeing her at the railway station was very useful. But it did fill in a part of their picture about her movements after leaving her home earlier in the day.”

  She said, “Yes, all right. There was a man. I don’t how she came to meet him. She told me he was in London just for the day, and they talked for a bit. And then he asked her to join him for dinner. I know this because Marjorie mentioned it casually in another context, that it brought home to her just how much she missed Meriwether and the things they often did together. It pointed up her loneliness, she said, and she was left to face that. ‘I shan’t do that again,’ she told me. ‘It’s too painful.’”

  “Did she tell you the man’s name?”

  “No, and I really didn’t care to ask. I didn’t want to make more of the event than she already had done. I was hoping it would come to nothing.”

  “But she saw him again?”

  “She must have done. I met her coming out of a milliner’s shop with a hatbox in her hand. She greeted me sheepishly, as if she hadn’t wanted to run into anyone she knew. I was about to tease her when it occurred to me that perhaps she was dining with that man again. There was almost a schoolgirl’s furtiveness about her.”

  “Can you be sure it was the same man?”

  “I must believe it was. Marjorie wasn’t the sort to take up with strangers, and it was no more than a month after the first dinner.”

  “What happened next?”

  “It was almost a month later—two months after that first dinner—and she was standing waiting for a cab, and I saw she’d been crying. My first thought was that she’d had bad news about Meriwether, and she answered that she’d had a letter from him only the day before and he was all right.” She shook her head. “Looking back, I wonder if she’d broken off with this man. It was the last time I saw her—she began to refuse invitations, keeping to herself after that. There was this group of women she worked with. I told myself at the time that listening to their experiences was doing her more harm than good. I should have made an effort to see her, but I had my own worries, and I kept putting it off. To tell you the truth, I thought she might feel compelled to confess, and I didn’t want to know.”

  “Do you perhaps know of a Lieutenant Fordham?” I asked.

  Mrs. Calder frowned. “Ought I to know him? Do you think he was the man Marjorie was seeing?”

  “I have no real reason to believe it. His name came up in a different connection. But I’d like to ask, if Marjorie were in trouble—of any kind—would she have turned to you for help? And if not to you, where would she go?”

  “She didn’t come here. My housekeeper would have told me if she had called. I wish she had.” She shook her head. “There’s really no one else she was close to. Except for Michael Hart. But of course he was in France.”

  “If you could ask among her friends? It could lead somewhere.”

  “Yes, by all means. I’m ashamed now that I didn’t do something. You’re very brave to take on this search. It should have been me.”

  But she hadn’t wanted to know.

  I told her how she could contact me, and thanked her.

  Sadly, we were still no closer to finding Marjorie’s killer.

  I was outside on the pavement, preparing to crank the motorcar, when I realized that she hadn’t asked me if Marjorie was pregnant.

  Did she know already? Or was this something else she didn’t want to hear?

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  AS I WAS about to pull over at the Marlborough Hotel, I saw a face in a cab window that caught my attention. Serena Melton. She appeared to be very upset.

  I swerved back into heavy traffic, ignoring a horn blown in disgust, and fell in behind her cab, wondering where she might be going, although it was more likely that she was coming from somewhere instead.

  But I was right. She was going. I trailed her back to the house where her brother and his wife had lived. She asked the cabbie to wait and went up the steps to knock at the door.

  There was no answer. She waited for a moment and tried again. And again no one came to answer the summons.

  She was coming back down the steps, when I turned in behind the cab and called to her.

  “Serena? Imagine running into you in London. Could I take you somewhere?”

  She looked at me, and after a moment paid off the cabbie and came to join me in my motorcar.

  “What brings you to London?” she asked. “I thought you were in France again. “

  “How are you?” I asked her instead of answering. Then, “Is anything wrong?”

  “I’ve just had a most unpleasant conversation with someone who knew my brother’s wife. It was very upsetting.”

  “In that house? The one you were just coming out of?”

  “No, no. That’s my brother’s house. I was hoping to have some tea and a lie down, before taking the train home.”

  “Are you any closer to finding out who killed your brother’s wife?” It was baldly put but there was no other way to ask.

  “How did you—oh. The weekend at Melton Hall.” She sighed, pulling off her gloves and then after a moment putting them on again. “It’s been the most hopeless task. But the police are still sitting on their hands, doing nothing. I spoke to the inspector in charge this morning. He tried to assure me that everything possible was being done. But it isn’t. I know it isn’t.”

  “It’s likely—” I began, but she interrupted me, turning toward me with anger in her eyes.

  “His latest theory has to do with someone from Oxford. I don’t know that Marjorie even knew anyone there. He’s grasping at straws.”

  I couldn’t explain what I’d been told about the reason the police were searching for that person. It wasn’t my place to pass on such information if the police had not. And so I said, “Do you have any idea what your sister-in-law did that day?”

  “The police have told me that she went out in the early afternoon and never came back. She knew Merry would be arriving that day, and I’d assumed she would go at once to see him. I was intending to visit him the following day, when he was a little more rested from his journey. But of course the police were at our door before I could go. And it was left to me to tell him what had happened. I couldn’t understand how she’d come to die in London. I thought there must be some mistake. They’d had some difficulty in identifying her—her purse was taken—and if her housekeeper hadn’t spoken to the constable on their street, the police wouldn’t have known who she was as soon as they did.”

  It was, for the most part, what Michael had learned from Marjorie’s housekeeper.

  We were nearing Kensington Palace. I said, “You remarked earlier that you’d just had an unpleasant conversation—” I left it there.

  “I wish you hadn’t reminded me. This woman had the audacity to say that people were talking about Marjo
rie long before she was killed, and that she was asking for trouble, walking down by the river at night on her own. She made her sound like a common tart, looking for custom. It was there, in the tone of voice she used.”

  “What sort of talk was there?”

  “That she was avoiding her friends, insinuating that she must be in some sort of trouble. Well, someone in London knows where she was that evening. Why won’t he or she tell us the truth?” Her voice was rising again, and she fidgeted with her gloves as if they had offended her, not the woman. “I blame Helen Calder. She ought to have noticed something. Marjorie would have listened to Helen if she’d spoken up. In the beginning, before it had got too far. But she shut her eyes, didn’t she? The sort of woman who wasn’t willing to put herself out for anyone, safe in her own rectitude.”

  It was a harsh indictment, not really warranted, but I’d seen Helen Calder’s willing detachment even when she suspected that Marjorie was growing too fond of the man she’d been seeing. I didn’t believe that she could have changed the situation, but I could understand Serena Melton’s feeling that she might have made a difference.

  “There must be a reason why she—” I began.

  But she interrupted me for a second time. “We’re speaking of behavior that led to murder. I would have said something, if I’d had any inkling that Marjorie was being talked about. I’d have confronted her and told her what I thought of such selfish conduct.”

  “Are you saying that her—that an affair had something to do with her death?”

  She cast a withering glance in my direction. “When you flout the rules of society, you leave yourself open to the consequences of your actions. If she’d been at home, if she’d been with respectable friends, she would still be alive and Merry would still be alive.”

  All pretense that Marjorie had been killed in the course of a robbery had been dropped. I don’t think Serena was aware of it, the volatile mixture of distress and anger, grief and frustration blinding her to everything else.

  We drove in silence for a time, and then she said, “I might as well go home. I don’t feel like facing any more blank faces and lies. The people who could really help me are Marjorie’s closest friends, but they’re fiercely loyal. Or else Victoria has told them not to talk to me. I wouldn’t put it past her.” She flicked a glance in my direction. “Marjorie’s sister. I can’t abide her, and neither could Marjorie.”

  The pent-up feeling of helplessness driving her must be exhausting, I thought, for there were new lines around her mouth, and circles beneath her eyes.

  I said, “Would your brother want you to go through this anguish, trying to get at the truth?”

  “I don’t know whether he would or not. But if the shoe were on the other foot, he’d have moved heaven and earth to find out who had killed me. I can do no less. Just because I’m a woman, I’m not going to walk away from this.”

  I couldn’t have said whether Lieutenant Evanson would have felt that way. But then he hadn’t lost his sister while I was caring for him. I couldn’t have guessed how angry he would have been, or if he’d have left matters to the police.

  “Would you mind dropping me at the station? I’m sorry to ask you to turn around. But it would be a kindness.”

  I did as she asked, and when she had left the motorcar, she turned back to me and said, “If you hear anything about Marjorie, anything at all, you would let me know, wouldn’t you?”

  Now there was a conundrum. I hadn’t told her what I knew. And I couldn’t in good conscience promise to keep her informed. And I wasn’t sure I trusted her to act wisely if she did learn the truth.

  “Serena—” I began.

  But she said bitterly, “You’re just like the rest, aren’t you?”

  “No,” I said sharply. “I will go to the police if I hear anything that’s helpful in finding her murderer. That’s what everyone should do.”

  “Liar,” she answered, turning her back.

  And she was gone, marching toward the station as if she were marching to war.

  In a way she probably thought she was.

  I took Michael, still protesting, back to Little Sefton.

  “I’ve made a promise to your doctors,” I told him over his protests when I finally ran him to earth at the Marlborough. “After I keep it, you’re free to do as you like.”

  He was not in a good mood. As we threaded our way through London’s traffic—mostly bicycles, military convoys or vehicles, omnibuses, and the occasional lorry trying to make deliveries to the next shop—I let him sulk.

  He did it beautifully. But I was immune to his blandishments.

  When we were in the clear and running through the countryside beyond London, I said, “I came looking for you earlier. Where were you?”

  At first I was sure he wasn’t going to tell me. Finally, he said, “I went to Scotland Yard.”

  Surprised, I asked, “And did they have news for you?”

  “They would tell me nothing.” There was suppressed anger in his confession. “Apparently I’m a suspect in Marjorie’s death.”

  “But—you said you were in France.”

  Yet Jack Melton had told me he was not.

  He turned to look at the passing scene, as if he hadn’t heard me. Then, grudgingly, he went on. “I haven’t said anything about it. I was given forty-eight hours’ leave. A foreign object in my eye. I was sent to a specialist in London. My men were in rotation, I could be spared. He removed the particle, gave me drops and a patch, and I went straight back to the line. I didn’t actually lie. Everyone thought I was in France. I let them go on thinking it. But the Yard stumbled on the truth.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I hadn’t heard from Marjorie for three months. Just—silence. I wrote to Victoria, but she wouldn’t answer. That worried me more. I tried to get word to Meriwether, to ask him if everything was all right. But it didn’t get through. When my eye was inflamed, they thought I might lose it, and I was given the choice of seeing someone in Paris or in London. Luckily, I knew a chap in school whose father was an eye surgeon in Harley Street, and the doctors at the Front approved.”

  “And did you see Marjorie?”

  “No. I sent her a telegram the day before, telling her where I would be, begging her to come and sit with me for a bit. Either she didn’t get the message or she had something else on her mind. She never came.”

  He was staring at a field where cows grazed, and so I couldn’t read his face.

  “And you didn’t go to the house? Why not?”

  “I was told not to leave the surgery. Not to move for twenty-four hours. I waited all that day and the next for her, and she didn’t come.”

  “You went back to France, not knowing she’d been killed?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Michael—?”

  He turned to me, his face twisted with grief and anger. “Do you know how many times I’ve wondered if she was on her way to Dr. McKinley’s surgery when she was killed? How many times I’ve wondered if she might have lived if she’d been with me instead of out on the street somewhere and vulnerable?”

  And Marjorie’s housekeeper had said she went out earlier in the day and never returned. From the train station, could she have been on her way to see Michael? Was the timing right?

  Catching sight of the next turning, I asked as I slowed for it, “You couldn’t leave the surgery?”

  “Dr. McKinley told me not to jar the eye in any way. He left me in a darkened room and his wife brought me my dinner and my breakfast the next morning.”

  “So you weren’t supervised?”

  “I was there whenever they looked in on me,” he said, which wasn’t necessarily the same thing.

  I let a little time pass.

  “Was it your child she was carrying?”

  “No,” he said quietly. “It was not.”

  And this time I believed him.

  We arrived in Little Sefton late in the afternoon. I took Michael directly
to the house of his aunt and uncle.

  As I helped him get out of the motorcar, stiff from the drive down, he said, “Thank you, Bess Crawford. For taking me to London.”

  “I’m sorry it wasn’t more helpful.”

  “It made me feel less useless. As if I’d at least tried to find the truth.” He nodded to me, picked up his valise in his good hand, and walked up to the door. There he turned, and with that smile that seemed to light up the world, he said, “Give my regards to Sergeant-Major Brandon.”

  I laughed in spite of myself.

  I went on up the street to Alicia’s house and knocked at the door. She was surprised to see me but greeted me with friendly warmth. “I didn’t expect to find you on my doorstep. But do come in. I’ll put on the kettle and make sandwiches.”

  I thanked her and joined her in the kitchen as she worked. It was her cook’s day off, and she was rummaging in the pantry for cold chicken and a pudding as she said, “This is my dinner, but I dine alone far too often. It will be nice to have someone to share my meal.”

  We ate it in the kitchen, and talked about everything but the war.

  “I’m tired of knitting and growing vegetables to save room in the holds of ships for war materiel,” she said as we ate our pudding. “I’m restless, I want to do something useful, really useful. But Gareth won’t hear of turning the house into a hospital or my going to London and finding work. I type, you know.”

  “Do you? You’ll be in demand.”

  “I think what he really wants is to know that nothing has changed at home. Not the village, not the house, not me. That it’s all there to come back to.”

  “A good many soldiers feel that way. It’s what sees them through.”

  “He sent me photographs in the last letter but one. Would you like to see them? His father gave him a camera for his birthday and he’s been using it to capture memories, he said.”

  “I’d love to see them.” I had a long drive ahead of me, but she had been good enough to invite me to dine, and I owed her a few minutes of my time.

  She went off to find the letter, and I finished my pudding, looking out at the kitchen garden and the outbuildings and the quiet peace of late afternoon.