The shaggy ash trembled on the end of Cockrill’s cigarette, broke and fell like a grey snowflake, softly on to the table. He put out his hand and absently brushed it away, leaving a dry, grey smear. He said, dreamily: ‘If Raoul Vernet rang up.’
Charlesworth looked up sharply. ‘If he rang up? We known damn well he rang up.’ Sergeant Bedd, doubting, murmured a word and he took it up from him. ‘Collusion? You surely don’t suspect collusion between those two—Dr. Edwards and that girl?’
‘Not collusion,’ said Cockrill; ‘no. Rosie would be a very bad person to collushe with—you wouldn’t dare. She’d blurt it out two minutes later, all fluttering eyelashes and ackcherlies. Somebody spoke to her on the ’phone, that’s certain; but whether it was Vernet.… And of course, if it wasn’t.…’ His eyes shone with the joy of it, the relief of it.
‘Why the hell shouldn’t it have been?’ said Charlesworth, angry with anxiety. ‘Of course it was Vernet: why shouldn’t it have been?’
‘Only that Vernet was a foreigner.’
‘O.K., so he was a foreigner—he could still use the ’phone, I suppose? He spoke quite good English, by all accounts, plain English, perhaps, not fancy stuff, but there was nothing fancy about that message.’
‘Except perhaps for the mastoid mallet,’ said Cockrill, comfortably.
CHAPTER TEN
ROSIE was ackcherly utterly mis. about Thomas, to think that poor, darling Thomas was mewed up in some frightful gaol and really, let’s face it, all because of her. If only she hadn’t been so naughty in Geneva, or, since really that had been inevitable because one was the way one was and one just couldn’t help it, if only that stupid old Raoul hadn’t come whizzing over in his beastly aeroplane to sneak to Matilda about her goings-on.… It was sort of fun at home, ackcherly, at least not fun at all of course, but frightfully exciting with police tramping about everywhere and reporters ringing up and coming to the door and climbing into the garden over walls and goodness knew what, and some of them were great fun, and terribly humorous, they honestly were, only it was horrifying to see in the papers next morning what nonsense they made up … But still, one had to be honest, one couldn’t deny that it was not what one might call dull. Of course Matilda was in the last stages of gloom and terribly cross most of the time, bursting out into fits of unreasonable ill-temper, Gran alternating between hilarity and deepest depression, Melissa for ever in tears and tremblings, and poor, darling Thomas … For the hundredth time she said plaintively to Cockie that surely it must have been a burglar all the time; because it was idiotic to think that Thomas …
‘Do try and remember about that ’phone call, Rosie.’
‘But I have remembered,’ said Rosie. ‘I’ve told you all all about it, over and over again.’
‘You don’t think,’ said Cockie, all casual, ‘that if you were on the spot you’d remember perhaps? Some littld extra thing?’
‘I might,’ said Rosie, doubtfully. Anyway it would be something to do; the reporters seemed to be falling off a bit to-day, and everyone at home was hell. She climbed thankfully into a taxi with Cockie and went round to Tedward’s house.
Ted Edwards also, was sick at heart for his friend. Already late for his afternoon surgery, he still hung miserably about the house with his hands in his pockets, staring out of the window at the bleak, pewter-grey of the canal. Of course there was no real danger; one way or another they would get Thomas out of it, even if he had to confess to the thing himself. Not that the police could possibly prove anything against him; but it would create a diversion—indeed, it would be rather fun. Only quite how to set about it was the thing.…
Rosie appeared suddenly at the window and scrabbled on a pane with her long, curved, pink nails like a cat pleading to be let in. When he got round to the front door, Inspector Cockrill was there too. They explained their errand. ‘Of course,’ said Tedward. ‘Go ahead. Only I’ll have to go off and leave you to it, because I’m late already; and I’ve got all Thomas’s stuff as well as my own. But Rosie can show you all right, she knows her way round.’
‘What about the old trout—hasn’t she come back?’
‘No, indeed,’ said Tedward. ‘She’s “sent for her things” in dudgeon; it’s obviously not the thing for me to have got mixed up in a nasty murder.’ He laughed. ‘She’s probably working on her reminiscences of me already; what I have for breakfast and how I wear out my socks. Bad cess to her!’ He went out to his car.
‘I do adore Tedward,’ said Rosie, watching him as he manœuvred his stubby form through the narrow door and subsided into the driver’s seat. ‘He’s so sort of solid and comfortable. Tedward Bear I call him; it makes him so mad!’
It was true that it made Tedward mad: mad with that ravening hunger of his for something more tender from her, or something less—better that she should be cold and disregarding altogether than torment him with her innocent coquetries, her little, offhand pet names and dabbing caresses that proclaimed aloud that to her he was no more and never would be more than dear old, tubby old Tedward Bear, comfortable and kind. He let in his gears with a grinding jerk and shot forward through the gate, his eyes blinded by the mist of his idiotic tears. I must get over it, he thought; I must shake it off. A fat, cross-grained, hard-up old buffer like me, slavering over a girl of half my age … It was disgusting, it was absurd, he was ashamed of his weakness in persisting in this octogenarian folly; but the moment he set eyes on her, so fresh and spring-like in her ebullient health and gaiety and that sort of overlying innocence of mind—all his resolves were scattered to the wind and his head was in the stars—and his heart in his boots. He shot across the stream of the traffic turning out into Maida Vale and a volley of curses brought him abruptly to his senses. He flapped a penitent hand at bus and taxi drivers, and continued more soberly towards St. John’s Wood: all unaware that in the house he had left, his belovéd was unwittingly settling down to prove him a murderer.
The house was on the simplest possible plan: the front porch opened on to a wide corridor running straight through to the back door, with the stairs leading up off it; to the right of the front door was the sitting-room and behind that the surgery; the window of the surgery, close to the back door, looked out on to a pleasant small London garden. But a tangle of outhouses beyond kitchen and dining-room on the far side of the house rendered the garage inaccessible except by a good deal of awkward manœuvring; even knowing it as well as its owner must, Cockrill could see that it must have been tricky on a night with a pea-soup fog. He went back to Rosie, curled up in the comfortable armchair before the Cosy stove in Ted-ward’s surgery with the cat, like a lump of carved anthracite curled on her knee. ‘What on earth have you been doing, Cockie?’
Cockie modestly h’m-h’m’d. ‘Oh, I see; beg your pardon. Well, what now?’
‘I want you to tell me exactly—but exactly,’ said Cockie who had caught this dreadful expression from Rosie herself, ‘what happened here, night before last, when Raoul Vernet died.’
‘Oh, lor’!’ said Rosie; it was so boring, going over and over the thing. ‘Well, I’ve told you. I got here just about nine. Tedward went out and made me a cup of tea.…’
‘You were in here? In the surgery?’
‘No, we went into the drawing-room and he lit the gas and made me sit in a chair and nurse the cat while he got the tea. I was a bit frozen, what with the fog and all.’
Cockrill went through the dividing door into the other room. ‘You took the ’phone call in here? Or in the surgery?’
‘No, I just picked up the extension in the drawing-room. It was right by my hand.’
‘Come through here and show me.’
Rosie heaved herself up reluctantly and came through from the surgery, the cat hanging contentedly over her shoulder like a fur; its black tail twitched in ecstasy as she ruffled her fingers through its shining short coat. ‘You are a nice cat,’ she said to it.
‘Never mind the cat. Now you were sitting—where?’
‘Oh, Cockie, what does it matter? I was sitting here and Tedward put the tray here on this table by the telephone. So then he said I ought to go home, because I’d been so long coming, you see, and I was a bit worn out what with the baby and all. Ackcherly that’s what I’d come to talk to Tedward about; and also because I wanted to get away from Raoul.’
‘But you didn’t have time to discuss it?’
‘Well, no, because Tedward said I looked rotten and I ought to go home to bed and he’d get the car out and leave it ticking over and warming up a bit, and I suppose I could have talked to him while I finished my cuppa, only then the business of the telephone call happened and we never got round to it.’
‘Well now, yes, this telephone call; that’s what we’ve come about.’
‘I just went on with my tea and in about a minute the ’phone went and the voice said all that about come quick and someone hit me with a mastoid mallet and all the rest of it; and then Tedward came back and I told him and we whizzed off.’
‘And it was a foreign voice?’
‘Well, yes, of course, because it was Raoul’s voice,’ said Rosie. ‘I mean, wasn’t it?’
‘That’s what I’m not so sure about,’ said Cockie.
‘Not Raoul’s voice? Then whose?’
‘Supposing,’ said Cockie, very carefully, ‘that I suggested to you that it was—Tedward’s voice?’
Rosie sat down with a plonk on the edge of the drawing-room armchair and the cat slid indignantly off her shoulder and scrambled on to the back of the chair and sat there angrily. ‘Tedward’s?’
‘Can you see any way that it might have been?’
‘Tedward’s? No, of course not. As if Tedward …’
Cockie sat down on the chair facing her and leaned forward and took her plump, tapering hands in his. ‘Rosie—I know you’re fond of Tedward; but you’re fond of Thomas too, aren’t you; you’re more fond of Thomas than Tedward? After all he’s your brother—and a very good brother too.’
‘Well, yes, of course.…’
‘So, of the two—wouldn’t you rather that Tedward was a murderer?’
‘I don’t see how he can be anyway,’ said Rosie, shrugging off the issue as usual. ‘How can he be?’
‘Supposing—supposing he hadn’t got the car out then at all? Supposing he’d run round to the nearest call-box and rung up this number and pretended to be Raoul.…’
Rosie made a little ducking, denying movement of her head. ‘Well, first of all he had got out the car, because there it was ticking over outside the front door, and it takes simply ages to get out of Tedward’s garage, even at the best of times.’
‘Suppose it had been ticking over there, all the time.’
‘It couldn’t have,’ said Rosie. ‘I’d have seen it when I arrived.’
‘If it had been just round the corner, outside the garage, ticking over—it wouldn’t have taken him a moment to drive it round, would it?’
‘Good lord,’ said Rosie, ‘what a thing to think of!’
‘But it’s true isn’t it?’
‘I suppose it could have happened; but anyway, it doesn’t matter because how could he have rung me up? And anyway, why?’
‘Never mind why. Now, you know this place very well: is there a telephone call-box anywhere near?’
‘No, there isn’t,’ said Rosie promptly. ‘There isn’t for miles. I know because when the line conks Tedward has to get out the car and drive to the pub.’ She added intelligently that it would have taken him hours to get through the fog to any pub that night.
‘What about the house next door?’
‘Oh, pooh,’ said Rosie, contemptuously. ‘As if he could! I mean the people could tell you in a minute, and then where would he be?’
This also was very much to the point. ‘Is there another ’phone in the house?’
‘No, there isn’t. There’s one in the surgery and the extension in here and an extension by Tedward’s bed upstairs, for night calls; and that’s all.’
‘Of course he could have rung through from the real ’phone to this extension.’
‘I’d have heard him,’ said Rosie. ‘It’s only in there.’ She jerked her chin towards the adjoining surgery.
‘He spoke very low.’
‘Well, yes, I suppose so. But, anyway, how could Ted-ward have got the bell to ring? I mean, it’s too much coincidence to think that it just conveniently rang at that moment and he cut the other person off and crashed in.’
Cockrill had always known that through the solid ivory of Rosie’s head ran a streak of the shrewd common-sense of her Welsh forebears. He respected it now more than he ever had done. ‘That’s what I can’t make out, Rosie, either. Suppose … Suppose he’d arranged with Operator to ring him at just that time?’
‘How did he know that it would be the right time? I didn’t even arrive on schedule—I was late. And, anyway, he’d have had to say something to Operator, “thank you” or something, and he couldn’t, because I lifted the receiver while the bell was just on its third or fourth ring and the voice chimed in immediately. Besides,’ said Rosie, waxing quite enthusiastic, ‘what’s more to the point is that you’d only have to check that with Operator.’
‘If I thought of it!’
‘If Tedward was the kind of thinking-out murderer that you want him to be,’ said Rosie, ‘he wouldn’t take risks like that.’ She added that anyway, Cockie had thought of it now so he could just ring up Op. and find out.
‘Yes, I shall some time,’ said Cockie. But he knew that she was right. ‘You aren’t such a mutton-head, Rosie, as one sometimes thinks.’
‘I know,’ said Rosie with modest complacency. ‘People are always finding that out and being surprised.’
The cat, perceiving that things were settling down again, crept off the chair-back and established himself with contented wrigglings on Rosie’s lap once more. Cockrill left them there, the fair head bent over the bright, dark coat, and went softly through the door to the surgery closing it behind him, and out of the further door into the passage and so round to the garage. A minute, perhaps less than a minute, to run the car round to the front door, if it were standing there round the corner, ready and ticking over. He went in and stood with his back to the Cosy stove, deep in thought. Tedward’s big desk was up against the window, looking out on to the little garden; the telephone stood there, guarding its secrets with a closed, black mouth. He got out his papers and rolled one of his shaggy cigarettes. Ted Edwards must be a good doctor to consult; practical, comfortable, unformidable, warm-hearted—rather like this room! A big screen hid the cupboard of bottles and instruments, the examination couch, the ‘business end’ of it all, and there were big, easy chairs where, when all that was over, he might sit and talk to those that needed it, like a friend; opening the doors on the bright, warm glow of the anthracite stove.…
So why, when Rosie arrived, cold and tired on a dank, bleak night, had he taken her through from that cosy room into the drawing-room and ‘lit the gas fire’ for her?
The window slid up with very little sound. He put the telephone out on to the sill and closed it down again. Outside, with the telephone cord at full stretch, and the receiver in his left hand, he could just reach the back door bell with his right; and what is recognisable about a telephone bell is not so much its tone as that characteristic rhythm, that shrill ring-ring, ring-ring, ring-ring.…
‘Hallo?’ said Rosie’s voice, piping up at him from the receiver, held absently away from him in his left hand. ‘This is Dr. Edwards’ house, but I’m afraid he’s not here.…’
CHAPTER ELEVEN
MELISSA opened the door to Cockrill that evening when, triumphant but depressed, he left the house on the canal bank in the hands of Charlesworth’s minions and went back to Maida Vale. Rosie had gone off upon her own occasions; it was all too silly and Tedward would just laugh, but on the other hand it certainly was most peculiar and Cockie was terrific; all the same, they’d called him in to he
lp them, not to go and make out that poor Tedward had done it.… Even for Thomas.… ‘Surely we needn’t go and tell the police, Cockie? I mean let them find out for themselves if they want to.’
‘I am the police,’ said Cockie.
‘Yes, but I mean not to us, you’re not; and you promised.…’
‘No, I didn’t,’ said Cockie. ‘I made no promises at all, and I’ve got my duty to do.’
‘Well, of course Tilda will be glad about Thomas, but she’ll be jolly mad about Tedward, I can tell you.’
Fortunately Matilda was still out, doubtless upon her ceaseless activities in support of her husband’s cause. Melissa took him into the kitchen and made him a cup of tea. She looked very white and scared these days and her eyes were heavy, with dark lines under them; her hair hung forward floppily over her face and Cockrill thought idly that it was true, perhaps, these young creatures did, sub-consciously, seek to shelter behind these masses of forward falling hair, and idly wondered what Melissa could have to hide. He leaned back against the Aga, warming the seat of his trousers on its cream enamelled surface, ‘This is nice, Melissa. A little oasis of peace.’
‘The kitchen always seems sort of comforting,’ said Melissa. ‘It’s warm and shiny and kind of everyday; you can forget for a little while—all this.’
‘About the murder you mean?’
‘Has there been any news about Stanislas, Inspector Cockrill?’
‘No,’ said Cockie. ‘He certainly seems to have been a mysterious young man.’ If he ever existed, he added, not out loud.
‘Yes, he was mysterious, Inspector. That was the thing. It isn’t me that’s made him mysterious, it isn’t even him not turning up like this. He was mysterious anyway; I mean, like not telling me who he really was, no address or telephone number or anything like that.’ Stanislas had, in fact, had a telephone number; one dialled it and simply asked for ‘Mr. Stanislas’, nothing more on pain of death; a jolly, common voice replied that it would see if he was in and, probably on pain of death too, reported guardedly, In and coming in a minute or, without embellishment, Out; but Melissa had thought fit to exaggerate the cloak-and-dagger mystery of Stanislas for the benefit of the police, to whatever small extent it remained susceptible of exaggeration. ‘It makes it a bit awkward for me but still I don’t suppose it matters very much, does it? I mean, I didn’t know Monsieur Vernet, I’d never even heard of him till the day he was coming here, so it couldn’t be anything to do with me; could it, Inspector?’
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