“It was the right calibre, so I judged,” he said. “She said a friend gave it to her as a kind of curio some time ago, and she’d forgotten who the friend was.” He gave a grunt. “But what was that theory you were talking about?”
“It isn’t a theory,” I said. “It’s a suggestion I’d like to put up to you. Have you met Mary Carter, Mrs. Chevalle’s cousin?”
“A pretty, fair-haired girl? If so I just saw her and no more.”
“She’s the one who holds that house together, George. As Helen may have told you”—I just couldn’t help that malicious touch—“she’s the maid-of-all-work. Looks after the child and runs the house. Has to be sweet with Chevalle and his wife at the same time. I think she loves the whole three of them, but the wife the least. All the same, she’s not the kind who’d do anything to get a friend out of a jam. Hence the suggestion. Thora Chevalle strikes me as just the kind who’d bully Mary Carter and run her off her legs, and then go whining to her for help. What I’m getting at is, why shouldn’t Thora have got herself in badly with Maddon and then gone to Mary? What would Mary suggest? That Thora should go to Maddon and try and finally buy him off. Hence the fake holiday. Thora went to see him then, and late at night, but when she came back she could only tell Mary she was in a worse jam than ever. So Mary settled things in her own way. She fixed an appointment with Maddon for early the next morning; slipped along there and did him in and then disposed of the gun.” He slowly shook his head. “That slip of a woman? She never’d have the pluck to do that. I had something of the same idea myself but it wouldn’t work.”
“Don’t you believe it,” I said. “She’s no slip of a woman. She may look that kind, but I’ll bet she’s got all the pluck in the world.”
“Well, I’ll have another good look over her,” he said. “It’s not a bad theory, for you, even if I did have it first. So was that one you floored Chevalle with. That one about the Savings Certificates.”
“By the way,” I said. “I don’t know if you saw to the water in the radiator but the car’s steaming pretty badly.”
“So it is!” he said, and trod on the brakes.
“She’ll last you to the Wheatsheaf,” I told him, for we were just passing Bassetts.
But George was the careful kind. Right against us was a pond with a fallen willow in the middle of it and he made me bring water in an empty pint bottle he found in the back.
“Nice handy spot for that gun to have been dropped in,” he said as we moved off again.
“You’re right,” I told him. “Why not have it dragged?”
“Plenty of time,” he said. “A whole lot of things will have to happen before we get as far as that.”
The trouble was that just how many things and what were to happen, we neither of us had the foggiest idea. And if we had had, then I’d have stripped to the raw and grubbed about in the mud of that roadside pond till I’d found that gun, or knew at least that it wasn’t there.
CHAPTER X
CLOSING THE NET
Wharton saw Thora Chevalle that same afternoon, and by appointment. Even when talking on the telephone she was already in a flutter, Wharton told me, and it was she who suggested three-thirty as the time for his call. That was because Clarice would be awake by then and could be sent with Mary Carter on some errand to Porthaven, for there was a bus that passed the gate of Bassetts at three-fifteen.
This is what happened at the interview. As I was not there you may think the statement over-confident, but what you are about to read is what George himself told me as quite a dramatic story, and George could certainly dramatise himself, if nothing else. As for any extras, fifteen years of George have taught me all his tricks, as doubtless they have taught him mine. If you should think that you know already what Wharton was going to talk to Thora Chevalle about, I can only say that that interview told me quite a lot of things, and but for it there would have been no last chapter. And so then to what happened.
Thora Chevalle seemed reasonably at ease when she appeared at the already-open front door. Her ‘How-d’you do?’ was on the gushing side, and she was made up to kill. There was the escorting to the lounge, the patting of a cushion on the chair on which Wharton was to sit, and then the proffered cigarette-case. That gave Wharton a first-class opening.
“You’d never guess where I first saw a cigarette like this,” he said, with a pursing of the lips. “Well, not a cigarette exactly. A stub. Two stubs, in fact.”
Her interest seemed only polite.
“Yes,” Wharton said reminiscently. “It was in an ashtray at Five Oaks.”
Her eyes opened wide at that, but she didn’t seem anything approaching scared.
“Five Oaks! Why, I’ve never smoked a cigarette there in my life!”
“I know,” said Wharton taking out his wallet. “Here’s one of them. And it’s got your lip-stick on it.”
She gaped again, then had a look. “It does look like it,” she told him with a bit of a titter.
“And these two hairs,” Wharton said. “They’re yours. They were found on the back of an easy chair.”
“That would be when I called for War Savings,” she said. Then her eyes opened wide again. “But I never sat in a chair. Never in my life.”
Wharton was watching her. Her head shook quickly and she gave a little scowl as she said that, as if the thought of calls at Five Oaks was none too pleasant.
“And a still more funny thing,” Wharton was going on, “was that your finger-prints were found on an ash-tray there.”
“But I’ve never touched an ash-tray!” She was looking genuinely bewildered. “I’ve never even seen one!”
“Ah, well,” said Wharton with a sigh. “Maybe you fingered it absent-mindedly one day when you were there. You had a lot to think about, you know.”
“Whatever do you mean?” she said, and Wharton knew he had been lucky to make that remark so vague. But he was having a pretty poor opinion of her intelligence. “All dressed up to the nines,” was how he put it to me, “and the brains of a nit-wit. Hadn’t got the sense to see what I’d been driving at from the start. That’s why I thought I’d show her my teeth.”
“Well, perhaps you’d got used to it,” he told her. “But I shouldn’t have been very pleased myself if I had to call on a man like Maddon and give him a Savings Certificate out of my own pocket.”
Her face went a vivid red, so red that it was as if those scarlet lips of hers had paled. For a moment she panicked badly, and he was surprised when she managed to get some sort of control over herself.
“It’s not true,” she said, still staring at him wildly. “It’s not true.”
Wharton got to his feet and looked down at her.
“Stay where you are, Mrs. Chevalle, and listen to me. I’m not here to gossip or tell you fairy-tales. I’m here on business—the business of discovering who murdered Maddon. Look at me, Mrs. Chevalle, and answer my question. Maddon was blackmailing you—wasn’t he.”
“No,” she said. “No. It isn’t true.”
Wharton shrugged his shoulders. “And what if I can prove it to be true? What if I propose to bring you into a Court of Law and prove there that it’s true.”
“You’d never do a thing like that,” she said.
“So it is true.”
She sprang to her feet and then tried some dramatics of her own.
“I thought you were a gentleman, Mr. Wharton. I don’t think there’s any reason for going on like this. I think you’d better go.” And then, infuriated perhaps by his unbudging attitude and dry smile: “Major Chevalle will be simply furious when I tell him about this.”
“Sit down,” Wharton told her, and maybe the grimness of his voice or the look in his eyes scared her, for she did sit down. “I went into all this with Major Chevalle this morning, and he’s given me a free hand. He’s a man of honour and he has his duty to do, the same as I have. In any case, he’s nothing to do with this matter now. I’m in charge, and that’s why I’m here this
afternoon. I’ve asked you in so many words to explain certain things in connection with the shooting of Maddon, and so far I’m not satisfied with the explanations you have given me.”
“Do you dare to suggest that I’m telling you lies?”
“I dare anything,” he told her placidly. “If it were my own mother who’d shot Maddon I’d make her tell the truth. And sooner or later I’ll make you tell the truth—either to me, more or less in confidence as we are now, or publicly in a Court of Law. The choice is up to you.”
“But I have told you the truth.” Her lip began to quiver then, so he showed his teeth once more.
“The truth? You’ve told me nothing but lies!” He turned his back on her for a moment and then whipped round. “Look here, Mrs. Chevalle, let me put all this in a nutshell. If you had nothing to do with killing Maddon, it’s the simplest thing in the world for you to prove it. Maddon was shot at about six o’clock that morning. All you have to do is prove to me where you were at that time.”
“But I’ve already told you where I was!”
“I saw your friend Miss Taylor myself,” he told her. “She blew the gaff. More politely, she gave you away so as to save herself. You wrote her a letter that she was to say you were staying with her. You’d done that sort of thing before, and she was agreeable. To make it doubly sure you went to see her and you took her a nice little present. A handbag that cost a fiver if it cost a penny.”
That was when Thora Chevalle began to cry. Blubber was how George described it. “Her brains might be an excellent case of arrested development,” he told me, “but she had low cunning enough to use that handkerchief of hers to collect her wits. If she’d thought of softening me up, she was never more mistaken in her life. She shot me a look to see how I was reacting, and then at last she produced a beautiful yarn.”
The yarn came after a final sob and a dab at her eyes with the wisp of a handkerchief. The room was reeking of scent. “Mr. Wharton, may I tell you something in confidence?”
“Isn’t that what I’m here for?” he answered.
“Then it’s about my husband,” she said after a moment’s hesitation. “We are not on very good terms, but I think he spies on me, though I never spy on him. That’s why I won’t ever tell him where I go. I just go on a holiday and it’s not his business where I go. That’s why I made up that story with Aggie—Miss Taylor.” She gave a wan smile. “I do it to annoy him, really. I oughtn’t to say that, but you said you wanted me to tell the truth.”
“You do it to annoy him,” Wharton repeated non-committally. “Well, so far so good. Now perhaps you’ll tell me where exactly you were at six o’clock that morning.”
“You’ll believe me if I tell you?”
“I’ll believe you when I’ve been to the place myself and got the additional evidence of at least two witnesses I can trust” Wharton told her.
“But I couldn’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“Let anybody else know.”
“Ah, well,” said Wharton heavily, and reached for his hat. “I suppose I shall have to act in my own way.”
He was already at the lounge door when she called him back.
“But you can’t go like that!”
“Listen,” Wharton said, and turned on her fiercely. “If you think I can stay here and listen to all the lies you’re prepared to concoct, you’re very much mistaken. Where were you that morning at six o’clock?”
“But I can’t tell you,” she said, and her hand wobbled frightenedly in front of her mouth.
“Right,” said Wharton grimly. “Listen to me again, Mrs. Chevalle, for as sure as my name’s Wharton, this is what’s going to happen. If within two days—by this time the day after to-morrow—you haven’t told me, and told me the gospel truth, about where you were, I’m coming here again. And I’m going to take an official statement from you as a suspect in the matter of the murder of Herbert Maddon. Forty-eight hours and the truth, mind you.”
“You couldn’t arrest me,” she told him defiantly.
“Not only can I but I will,” he told her. And something in that new attitude of hers must have angered him, for he let out more than he intended. “And within another twenty-four hours of that I’ll know the name of the man with whom you spent the night!”
A look of tremendous fright came over her face at that. Her fingers were frightenedly at her mouth again. He waited a moment in case she should choose to speak, but she turned away. Without another word he went out of the house and straight to me at Ringlands. Helen was out, but Annie brought us tea to the summer-house and it was over that that he told me the story of the interview. He was still definitely not himself. I think he was brooding over the question of whether or not he had gone too far, and, of course, there was always in the background the figure of Chevalle, and the avoidance of scandal, and if there had to be a scandal, how far it would affect the public opinion concerning Chevalle himself.
“What do you make of things?” he asked me, and extra-ordinarily earnestly.
“I don’t know,” I told him slowly. “What I have got is the impression that everything’s more blurred.”
“How do you mean?”
“Frankly I don’t see her so clearly as mixed up in that murder. What she ought to have been most scared of was getting hanged by the neck, but what really did scare her was being forced into admitting where she had spent that night.”
“Yes,” he said, and pursed his lips reflectively. “All the same, you can’t get away from solid evidence. But one thing I must say. I don’t think so much as I did about that theory of yours about complicity with that Mary Carter.”
“Why not?” I said, ignoring the fact that he had once claimed it as his own.
“Because she’d have given Mary Carter away to save her own skin,” he told me. “She’d sell anybody.”
“If there was anything in the theory, she may do it yet,” I said.
“She’ll give no one away to incriminate herself,” he told me.
“In any case I could have bitten my tongue off after I’d mentioned Mary Carter at all,” I said. “She’s a dam-good sort, and if she does have to be brought into things I don’t think I’ll ever forgive myself.”
“No use talking like that,” he said. “I’ll see her myself this evening. Make a private appointment somewhere over the telephone.” Then he shook his head. “It’s Chevalle that’s worrying me. Not that I think there need be any scandal.”
“Of course there needn’t,” I said. “Even if the worse comes to the worst there’d be no reflection on him. A man of his pluck could live things down. By the way, did you say anything to Mrs. Chevalle about that gun?”
“What was the use?” he said. “She’d only have told me more lies. Besides, you’ve got to leave liars with a few lies to clothe themselves with. If you strip them naked, they get desperate, and you don’t always want that.”
“Why did you give her as long as forty-eight hours?” I asked. “Wouldn’t twenty-four have brought her up to scratch?”
“It’s only one clear day,” he said, and, more grimly, “two whole nights. That’s when she’ll do her thinking.”
“What are you going to do yourself?”
“Plenty for me to do,” he said. “I might as well get rid of Galley, for all the use he is now. And those other men of his. Then to-morrow I’m going over that Five Oaks place with a microscope. And I might start putting the screw on Temple.”
“Still worrying yourself about where you met Maddon?” I asked him.
“Wouldn’t you?” he said. “Wondering who he was used to be bad enough before: it’s been ten thousand times worse since I’ve been down here. What time is there a bus from Porthaven, by the way?”
We went to the house and looked at the time-table. One was due at Cleavesham at half-past five.
“Then I’ll be pushing on,” he said. “That’s the bus that Mary Carter ought to be back on and I’d rather ring her up from the pub.”
<
br /> I felt a bit restless when he’d gone, so I took a walk through some field-paths I found on Helen’s map, and the finding of my way certainly kept my mind off the case. It was well on the way to meal-time when I got back, and almost eight o’clock by the time it was over. Then I had a look at the local Home Guard doing an exercise on a meadow opposite Ringlands, but the midges were a bit troublesome, so I adjourned to the house for the nine o’clock news. It was during that that the telephone went for me.
“Major Travers?” a feminine voice said.
“Yes,” I said. “Speak up, will you? I can’t hear you very well.”
“This is Mary Carter. I daren’t speak too loudly. Are you there?”
“Yes, I’m here.”
“Can I see you to-night? I know it sounds unusual—”
“Of course you can,” I cut in. “Where shall it be? Here?”
“No. Not there,” she said quickly. “On the path at the back of your house?”
“Good,” I said. “When?”
“In about a quarter of an hour?”
“I’ll be there,” I said, and then she rang off.
I told Annie I was going for a short stroll and she needn’t put the black-out up. Then I made my way to the back path, and as I didn’t know how much it was frequented, I walked towards Little Foxes, looking for a side path. Then I found a little ride that had been used for timber hauling, and when I at last caught sight of Mary I was glad I had thought of it, for she was wearing no coat and her light summer frock could have been seen for yards.
“Did you wonder what it was all about?” she asked me as we made our way along the ride. She was smiling bravely enough, but I could see she was perturbed, and that was revealing.
“I think I knew,” I told her, and stepped off the track to behind a thick beech clump. “You’d like me to help you; isn’t that it?”
“Well, yes,” she said. “But it’s not me, exactly. It’s Thora.”
“You trust me?”
“I shouldn’t be here if I didn’t,” she told me quietly.
The Case of the Platinum Blonde: A Ludovic Travers Mystery Page 13