“Oh! I know you’re thinking me a beast to suppose that Philip could be a murderer! But—” she stopped short, suppressing something she had been going to say. “But someone obviously was, and apparently someone in the house. And I was horrified; so horrified that I suppose I was a bit off my head. Can’t you imagine how frightful it was? I thought that somehow Phil—it had happened. My one idea was to protect Philip somehow. He’d left the pistol there, out of carelessness, I thought, and his finger-prints would be on it and you would find them, so I picked it up and handled it, hoping to rub them out!” Jenny shut her mouth tightly and glared at me defiantly.
“Didn’t it occur to you that that was very dangerous? That you might be accused of the murder?”
“I hadn’t done it, so I didn’t really think anything could happen to me, especially as I didn’t know anything at all about it. Besides, I had been in the hall all the time. People must have seen me there.”
“Whereas people hadn’t seen where Philip was, and that might tell against him. In fact, you yourself didn’t know where Philip had been, and perhaps that made you suspect him?”
“No; it wasn’t that!” Jenny cried vehemently. “I know where he was; I’m perfectly sure! He’s got an alibi; Carol can tell you. You must believe Carol! After that first awful moment I knew he couldn’t have done it. Oh, you must see that he couldn’t possibly!” Her repeated assertions were those of one who tries to convince herself as well as someone else.
“You’ve nothing against Philip, nothing whatever!” she went on. “Except that one thing, that we haven’t tried to deny, because it’s perfectly obvious, that he would benefit by Father’s death. But so would all of us! We all expect to get some of Father’s money! You can’t think Philip did it! You can’t! Oh, what can I say?” Tears blurred her eyes and she fumbled for a handkerchief.
Her distress seemed genuine, though one always suspects a woman’s tears on an occasion of this sort because they give her a convenient breathing space and may put her opponent off his guard. I tried to preserve an attitude of moderate sympathy which only took the edge off a stern desire to get on with the business. After a good deal of sobbing and sniffing and mopping, she responded to my exhortation that she should pull herself together and explain how she had become convinced of Philip’s innocence.
“When you asked us all those questions on the evening of Christmas Day,” Jenny continued, “I didn’t know what to say because I hadn’t had a chance of talking to Philip. But after you’d gone, he explained it all; how he had seen a chance of getting hold of Carol to have a talk alone with her and arrange how she should help us. Carol had rather a way with Father, if she took the trouble and he was in a good mood, and she always manages to get a thing done when she sets out to do it. I was sure that if she helped us with all the plans for Philip and me getting married and Hilda coming to live at Flaxmere instead of me, they would be sure to work out all right. That’s what Philip was doing all the afternoon. It’s perfectly simple.”
I reminded her that in her first interview with me she had left out another item, apparently unconnected with Philip—her visit to the servants’ hall to speak to Ashmore.
She cheered up at that, relieved, I think, at getting away from the subject of Philip. “I’d forgotten that. Yes, it happened while Oliver was talking to Father in the study. I ran out immediately the Christmas-tree business was over and I only stayed a minute or two talking to Ashmore because I imagined that as soon as Father had told Oliver exactly what he had to do, Father would appear on the scene again and probably want me to organize games or something for the children and would be fed-up if I wasn’t at hand.”
I asked her when she got back to the hall.
“Just before Oliver came out of the library—at least, I suppose it was Oliver? I’m so muddled now about who was who. But anyway, a Santa Klaus came out of the library just after I got back to the hall.”
“And what about Ashmore? Why had he come and why was there a conspiracy to deny that he was ever here?”
“It wasn’t a conspiracy! You do make everything sound so much worse than it is! I’m sorry about it, but when you began questioning us all I thought how awful it would be if you went and questioned Ashmore, just because he had happened to be here. He didn’t know a thing and he’s terrified of the police ‘getting their hands on him,’ as he says. They got their hands on him once when he was a boy, for something frightfully trivial, like robbing an orchard, and he nearly lost his job here because of it and he always thinks that if they should get their hands on him again, even for parking his car in the wrong place, and that old business should come out, he’d be finished. So I thought it better not to say anything about him and I passed the word to Carol not to and we asked Parkins not to. We’d already kept it rather secret, because we particularly didn’t want Father to know he was here. Father might have been furious, because he had some idea that Ashmore wasn’t properly grateful and hadn’t behaved well. Father always took any kindness we showed to Ashmore as a criticism of his own behaviour—which I suppose it was in a way.”
I asked again why Ashmore had come to Flaxmere, which Jenny had omitted from her flood of explanation.
“Carol was most frightfully sorry for him when he drove her and Hilda up from the station,” Jenny explained. “He looked ill and seemed so worried. So we decided to send him a big Christmas hamper and Carol went into Bristol with Patricia on Monday and ordered the things. He was awfully pleased and came all the way out here to thank us. Parkins told me he was here, so I just rushed out and said Happy Christmas to him and all that and told him to stay to tea. I suppose that if you can’t believe a thing I say and you must ask him, then you must. But do—please—do it kindly. He really is a poor old thing.”
I promised we would be tactful with Ashmore and told her—what was worrying me a bit—that he could not be found. Bristol police had telephoned to say that they had called twice at his house but his wife would only say he had gone out that morning without saying where he was going or when he would return. His car was in its garage. His wife seemed worried, they thought.
“I suppose he’s gone off on affairs of his own,” Jenny conjectured. “His wife is a whining sort of woman and I don’t wonder if he wants to get away from her sometimes. He’s sure to be back to-night. I’ll swear he has absolutely nothing to do with this affair and I don’t suppose he even knew my father was dead until he read the papers this morning. Why don’t you ask Carol about him? She doesn’t muddle things up like I do and perhaps you’ll believe her!”
I had decided that I wanted to talk to both Carol and Philip before Jenny had a chance to tell them of her interview with me, and perhaps it might be a good plan to question Carol in front of Jenny.
Jenny watched my hesitation and suggested, “Shall I go and find Carol? I think she’s doing something to her new black frock. Oh! I suppose you think I might give her some private instructions on the way! You needn’t worry about that. We’re quite ready to tell you the truth about Ashmore.”
Jenny rang the bell and gave instructions to the maid who answered it. To ease the situation I walked over to the side windows and looked at the bare garden and brick wall and made some aimless remarks about spring flowers. Jenny carried out some hasty repairs to her face. I was thinking that Jenny still suspected Philip. She didn’t quite trust his explanations and she was jealous of Carol. But she would stand by Philip to the last, protesting her belief in him in the face of the blackest evidence.
When Carol appeared I was struck again by the fact that this girl seemed much less affected by the general anxiety and distress than anyone else in the house. There was a resilience in her, the resilience of self-confidence and youth. Or was it of callousness and grim determination? The latter seemed absurd when you looked at Carol’s fine—one might have said sensitive—features and candid eyes.
As soon as she sailed into the room Jennifer exclaimed:
Jenny was evidently more disturbed by the man’s disappearance than she had admitted to me. Carol looked startled and very grave. She turned to me accusingly.
“What have you done to make him go? How do you come to know that he’s gone? It’s wicked if he is dragged into this beastly mess!”
“Just consider!” I urged them. “If the man is, as you say, completely innocent of any complicity and, in fact, ignorant of what actually happened, then you yourselves are to blame for making a great fuss about nothing. First your conspiracy of silence, then a car seen leaving Flaxmere when everyone in the house says that no car has been here. If Parkins had not very properly confessed to me, Ashmore might have had to undergo a very close questioning as to what he was doing here secretly that afternoon.”
“Yes, I see now that we are to blame and that it was idiotic of us not to tell you he was here,” Carol agreed, after considering this. “But we were none of us quite normal that evening. A horrible thing had happened and more than our judgment was upset. But don’t let’s argue about who’s to blame. If he has really disappeared, he must think you are after him and he might do something desperate. He must be found at once. One of us must go and tell him that it’s all right. But you haven’t explained. Why should he have gone?”
I told her what I knew.
“Well, of course,” she burst out indignantly. “If you sent police to his house, he’d be awfully upset—”
I pointed out that they were plain-clothes men.
“I’m sure he’d know what they were; they’d look like policemen, even in their best mufti, and they’d talk like policemen.”
I managed to get in a word to the effect that Ashmore had apparently taken himself off some time before the first plain-clothes man called.
“Are you sure?” Carol asked. “I can’t believe that. He has absolutely no reason at all to be worried. Unless there was something horrible in the papers. There might be. Some journalist might have routed out the fact that Ashmore was here.”
I didn’t think that likely, but we sent for all the papers which could be collected in the house and when they were brought we studied the pages announcing what most of them called the Christmas Crime, or the Santa Klaus Murder. There were plenty of lurid headlines, but very little real information, the lack of it being made up for by wordy and inaccurate descriptions of the house and family. There was no reference to Ashmore, nor could we find the least hint that he, or anyone in his position, was connected with the crime or under suspicion.
“There may be some other awful screaming rag that Ashmore reads,” Jenny suggested.
“Or perhaps, as Jennifer suggested to begin with,” I mildly ventured, “he has gone out on his own affairs and will be back this evening.”
The two young women looked at me suspiciously and coldly.
“You don’t really think that,” Carol accused me. “Your police have said something that makes you sure there’s some important reason for his disappearance.”
The Bristol police had actually reported that, from all they could discover, it was unheard of for Ashmore to go out, even for an hour, without telling his wife where he would be and when he would return. This was important for his business, to which he attended diligently. Some inquiries in the local public houses had not been very helpful. One publican knew Ashmore who, he declared, was “almost a teetotaller” and hadn’t been in the bar for days.
“Look here!” said Carol suddenly. “If Jenny or I could go and see Mrs. Ashmore, I believe we might get something out of her. Naturally she’s suspicious of your plain-clothes police!”
I suppose my face showed my doubt of the wisdom of this plan. Anyhow, Carol looked at me and laughed.
“Oh, blast! Of course we’re all under suspicion and observation and the rest of it and you daren’t let us out! Well, come yourself, if you like; only keep in the background! Or send another guard with us. Let Jenny go, with a nice fatherly policeman!”
I was sorry that Kenneth was not at hand. There might be something in Carol’s idea that she or Jenny could get more out of Mrs. Ashmore, and I began to think that Ashmore did know something and it was important to find him. I felt that Jenny certainly, and Carol possibly, really believed in Ashmore’s innocence. Perhaps he had picked up some clue quite by accident. Yet I was reluctant to turn either of those girls loose in Bristol, though I had no definite idea of what mischief they could do. I took a few steps up and down Jenny’s little room, whilst they watched me anxiously. Reaching a decision, I sent for Rousdon and held a colloquy with him in the passage outside the door.
We decided to let Bingham drive Jennifer to Ashmore’s house, and they should be followed by a plain-clothes man on a motor bicycle who was to keep himself in the background unless he noticed anything unusual or unless they overstepped their instructions, which were to go to the house, make the inquiries and come straight back to Flaxmere. Bingham—who had been helping the searchers of the outhouses, drawing their attention to lofts, producing ladders, unlocking doors—was supervised whilst he placed a rug in the Sunbeam and drove it round to the front door. The car itself had already been searched.
Jenny had put on a black hat and coat which she had selected from amongst the goods which deputations from two or three of the chief shops in Bristol had brought to Flaxmere that morning. Looking small and frail and anxious in the back of the big limousine, she drove off alone with Bingham.
Chapter Eighteen
Mr. Ashmore’s Story
by Jennifer Melbury
It was a relief to get away from Flaxmere, where we had all been cooped up so unpleasantly for what seemed weeks, though it was really only from the evening of Christmas Day—Wednesday—until this Friday afternoon. Colonel Halstock had been pretty unpleasant, but now that I began to think it over calmly, he had really been no worse than we all were. Everyone seemed perfectly beastly during those awful days. Oliver must have had the hell of a time, because although we all agreed that it seemed utterly idiotic that he should shoot Father, yet it did look like that to begin with. I don’t wonder that he was quite pleased to spend a night in prison and that he kept away from us when he returned to Flaxmere.
Then when we all grasped that there must have been what we called a “second Santa,” the suspicions grew worse, because none of us could see who it could possibly have been. Some people, Aunt Mildred and Patricia especially, who are quite impervious to reason, obviously wanted it to be poor Grace Portisham, though we all knew that Hilda had been talking to her in the hall all the time when the murder must have been committed. They evolved an idea that she might have done it immediately Oliver left the study, and it was true that she hadn’t joined Hilda till a bit later and no one could exactly remember when she came into the hall from the library, where she had stayed behind to clear up the litter when most of us drifted out. However, that wouldn’t account for the second Santa, and anyhow I was sure that poor Grace simply worshipped Father and wouldn’t dream of shooting him, even if she was going to get a lot of money by his death, which everyone was afraid of.
Bingham had said he knew the way to Ashmore’s house, but as we began to get into Bristol he stopped the car and slid back the glass partition behind him. I thought he was going to ask about the address, but instead of that he said, “Excuse me making a suggestion, Miss, but if I might be so bold, wouldn’t it be better for me to draw up just at the corner of the street, as it were, and for you to go up to the door by yourself? Make less stir in the street, like, if you understand my meaning.”
It seemed a good idea, because there would be sure to be a lot of excitement and talk if the big Flaxmere car were seen outside Ashmore’s door, and what Carol and I were specially anxious about was to avoid publicity for Ashmore. He had such a horror of it and it was all through trying to keep him out of it that we had
apparently made such a mess of things, and brought him under suspicion.
Bingham stopped the car in a busy street, just before the corner of the little road, with small houses in two grim rows, in which Ashmore lives. We were very inconspicuous, stopping there, as I might have been going to a shop.
I knocked at Ashmore’s door and it was opened a crack, and a voice behind it said surlily, “What is it?”
I said who I was and the door opened wider to show Mrs. Ashmore. She was always rather a draggled woman but now she looked more down-at-heel than usual, furtive and red-eyed. She took me into the parlour and then it suddenly came over me that I didn’t know quite what I was to say to her. I didn’t want to make her think I had anything to do with the police by asking straight out where her husband was. However, she got me out of the difficulty by pouring out a flood of sympathy and indignation about Father’s death.
“We was anxious, you’ll understand, all the Boxing Day, Ashmore having come back on Christmas Day with news of some accident to Sir Osmond, by reason of which he left hurriedly without knowing rightly what was the matter. We thought it might be that he had another stroke like he had in the summer. Ashmore would have rung up if it hadn’t been that he thought Sir Osmond would answer the telephone himself, as like as not, if he was in good health, we having no suspicion, of course that the poor man was lying dead, and thinking he might consider the inquiry uncalled for.”
She ran on like this, explaining just how anxious they were and what they said to each other and so forth, and I told her I was very sorry I hadn’t thought of letting them know and asked if Ashmore was at home.
“No, he’s not; and that’s the trouble!” she said.
I inquired whether anything was wrong and she burst out: “I don’t know what should be wrong or why there should be anything wrong, but Ashmore’s bin that upset since yesterday evening and this mornin’ off he goes with nothin’ to speak of inside ’im except just a cup of tea, and I’m not to say anything to anyone, though there’s little I could say if I wanted to, but the way he said goodbye to our Ada—she’s the weakly one, you’ll remember, Miss, an’ always at home an’ her father that devoted to her, would make your blood run cold. Jus’ as if he never thought to see the girl again an’ I says to Ashmore, I says, thinkin’ he was jus’ takin’ a short run, as he often does mornin’s, ‘I s’pose,’ I says, ‘you’ll be back within the half hour.’ At that he gives me a queer look an’ says, ‘There’s no knowin’,’ says he, ‘but anyway, you know nothing, old girl, and you’ll say nothing to any as may come making inquiries.’ An’ with that off he went and hasn’t bin seen since, and how he thinks we’re to get on without him, with nothing comin’ in but what he gets by the car and little enough of that, and me not knowin’ what to say to people when they ring up, I’m that worried I don’ know what to think!”
The Santa Klaus Murder Page 19