by Cyril Hare
“I do apologize for keeping you waiting like this,” said a voice behind him. He turned round as Mrs. Eales, a tremulous smile playing on her lips, came towards him with outstretched hand.
“You’ve come about poor dear Pompey, of course?” she began.
“Pompey?” The inspector was nonplussed for a moment.
“How stupid of me—Mr. Ballantine, I mean. Pompey was just a little pet name I had for him. Silly, of course, these pet names always are, don’t you think, Mr.—er——”
“Mallett.”
“Mallett—thanks so much—but he used to get so pompous sometimes that it seemed to suit him. And now he’s——” she pressed a handkerchief to her lips—“Oh, dear! I can’t trust myself to talk about that.”
“All the same, madam, I’m afraid I must ask you to talk about it,” said Mallett. “I am enquiring into Mr. Ballantine’s death, and I am here to find out what light you can throw on it.”
“Of course, yes. I must be very brave. Though I don’t know what light you will get from poor little me. Do ask me anything you like. Let’s sit down here, shall we, and make ourselves comfortable?”
She sat down on the divan, and patted the place by her side in invitation. Mallett had no objection to taking his place beside her. He was not the type of man who would allow his judgment to be affected by propinquity to an attractive woman, even when her charms were reinforced by an exotic scent and a carefully indiscreet display of a silk stocking. What was more important from his point of view, Mrs. Eales had so placed herself that the light of the shaded lamp by the divan shone on her. Sitting himself in semi-obscurity, Mallett studied her with interest.
Like her drawing-room, Mrs. Eales probably looked best by artificial light. Daylight, one felt, would have been too unkind to the lines of anxiety and nervousness about the corners of her eyes and mouth, revealed too clearly that her slender neck and throat were already just a touch too stringy. But seen as Mallett saw her at this moment, she was undeniably a handsome woman. She was dressed in unrelieved black, which set off her fair skin admirably. Her make-up was sufficiently careful to excuse the length of time for which she had kept the inspector waiting. He speculated on what her age might be, but soon abandoned the attempt and found himself watching instead the fascinating play of her expressive brown eyes and thin white hands, neither of which seemed able to be at rest for an instant.
“Will you smoke?” said Mrs. Eales, opening a box of gold-tipped cigarettes. “Oh, but you prefer your own, I expect. Men always do, don’t they? I’ll have one if you don’t mind. Now then, Mr. Mallett, you want to hear all about poor Pompey, I suppose. Of course, this has all been the most frightful shock to me, and I can tell you here and now that I have absolutely no idea how it can have happened. It’s—it’s been pretty hard, coming just now, you know,” she added, and for the first time through the hard brightness of her voice crept a note of sincerity.
“I may take it that Mr. Ballantine’s death has affected you rather badly, financially,” said Mallett.
She nodded. “The rent of this flat is paid for up to the end of the year,” she said, “and after that—well, it’s going to be pretty difficult, that’s all. Pompey always said he’d put me down for something handsome in his will, but I don’t suppose there’s anything to leave to anyone now, is there? Still . . . I’m afraid this isn’t much use to you, is it, Mr. Mallett?”
“In cases of this kind,” answered the inspector gravely, “it is always important to know who stands to profit by the murder. What you tell me is of importance from the point of view of—elimination, shall we say?”
“Meaning that I——? Yes, I suppose I might have guessed that when a man is murdered, his mistress naturally comes under suspicion”—she pronounced the ugly word in a defiant tone—“but in this case, if ever a woman stood to lose by it, I did.”
There was a pause, and then Mallett said: “Suppose you were to tell me everything there is to tell about yourself and Mr. Ballantine?”
She shrugged her shoulders. “There’s awfully little to tell really,” she replied. “We’d known each other off and on for some time—my husband was connected with the turf in those days, and we used to meet at race meetings a good deal. In the end, about two years ago, he took this flat and—there you are.”
“And since then he has lived with you here?”
“Yes. Perhaps that’s putting it too definitely, though. He might be here for weeks on end, perhaps, and then unaccountably he’d disappear for a bit. Then one day he’d ring up and ask me to meet him for dinner somewhere and afterwards he’d come back here and stay perhaps for a night, perhaps for another long spell. He was an unexpected man in lots of ways. I don’t know where he went between whiles. This was his headquarters, though, and of course it was always ready for him whenever he cared to use it.”
The phrase woke an echo in Mallett’s mind. Where had he heard something very like that before? Of course, Mrs. Ballantine had used almost the same words in her evidence at the inquest. Mount Street and Belgrave Square had both been open to Ballantine, but he had elected to die in Daylesford Gardens! The reflection prompted his next question.
“Did he ever mention Daylesford Gardens to you—or Colin James?”
“Never. I’m positive of that. As a matter of fact, he didn’t discuss outside matters very much.”
“You never tried to find out where he went to ‘between whiles’, as you put it?”
“No. I could guess sometimes, of course. He was always a bit polygamous, was Pompey. I never expected to have him all to myself. I know that sounds rather cattish, Mr. Mallett, but I don’t mean to be unkind. He was just made that way. He was an awfully good sort in so many ways, really, you know. People didn’t understand him, and he had an iceberg for a wife, but he’d do anything for anyone who knew how to be kind to him.” She sighed, and then, turning her lustrous eyes on the inspector, said vehemently: “I’m sure there’s a woman at the bottom of this! What else should he have gone to a dreadful little place like that for?”
“There is no evidence of the presence of any woman in the house at Daylesford Gardens,” Mallett reminded her. “But there is evidence that he may have been meditating leaving the country about the time that he was killed. What would you say to that, Mrs. Eales?”
She flushed, drew herself up and shook her head. “No, that’s not possible,” she muttered. “He wouldn’t have done that without telling me. After all, I was the person who counted most in his life, however many others there were. Mr. Mallett,” she went on, her voice rising as she spoke, “you’re not going to make me believe that Pompey meant to leave me in the lurch. I was his, I tell you, his! We made no bones about it—it was a perfectly open affair. Everybody knew we belonged to each other!”
“Including your husband?” Mallett enquired drily.
Checked suddenly in the full flood of her eloquence, Mrs. Eales was silent for a moment, while her flushed cheeks slowly paled.
“Oh, Charles!” she said at last, in a tone that might have meant anything. Then she gave a forced laugh. “Well, yes—including him too, I suppose. Does it matter very much? I mean, you don’t want to hear about all the details of a marriage that’s—that’s been a pretty bad failure, do you, Mr. Mallett?”
The plea for sympathy was prettily contrived, but the inspector ignored it.
“Obviously, I must know anything there is to know about the relations between your husband and Mr. Ballantine,” he said.
“But there weren’t any—naturally!”
“Am I to understand that you were entirely separated from your husband during your association with Mr. Ballantine?”
Mrs. Eales obviously found some difficulty in answering the question. For the first time in the interview a trace of fear showed itself in her wide-open eyes. Before she could answer, Mallett helped her out.
“You see,” he said gently, “we know that already, within a fortnight of Mr. Ballantine’s death, you are seeing him a
gain. It hardly looks as if there has been any final breach between you, does it?”
The well-timed disclosure had its effect. Mrs. Eales, he felt certain, had been on the brink of lying, though for what purpose he was still uncertain. Once committed to a falsehood, she would have gone stumbling on from one untruth to another, and her value as a contributor to the story which he was trying to piece together would have gone for good. Now the tension was relaxed and she began to speak again fluently and naturally, though the hint of fear remained to trouble the even tones of her voice.
“No,” she said. “There wasn’t any final breach. I’m afraid it’s a little difficult to put it into words. Our marriage had pretty well broken up by the time I met Pompey, of course, or all this would never have happened. But what had really broken it up was simply money—having no money, I mean, of course. I’m afraid that sounds rather brutal, but it is the fact. We are—we were always quite fond of each other, though it hadn’t been a love match by any means. But we were neither of us much good at economizing, and I”—she glanced round the room and settled herself back more deeply among the cushions—“I like my little comforts, you see; I wasn’t made to live on bread and cheese and kisses, and when the cash ran short, well—life simply became a cat and dog fight. So when this chance came along I told Charles that I’d simply got to take it. It was a bit hard on him, I know, but he saw my point.”
“Do you mind if I smoke a pipe?” the inspector asked irrelevantly.
“Oh, not a bit. Please do. I like to see a man smoke a pipe.” Mrs. Eales’s mind reacted to certain stimuli with the infallibility of a penny-in-the-slot machine. In response to Mallett’s request the appropriate cliché popped out almost of its own volition.
Behind the comforting cloud of tobacco smoke Mallett tried to visualize the situation Mrs. Eales had been describing—the selfish, shiftless couple, tied in matrimony the bands of which grew more and more frayed as their money melted away, the wife calmly announcing that she was going to live with a man who could keep her in comfort, and the husband—what had his attitude been? What would the attitude of such a man as Captain Eales be?
“What terms did your husband make for consenting to this arrangement?” he asked.
“Terms? I don’t understand.”
“But, Mrs. Eales,” said Mallett in tones of gentle expostulation, “you can’t really ask me to believe that your husband simply let this happen without trying to get something out of it for himself.”
She shook her head.
“I’m afraid Charles made very little out of it,” she said. “Mr. Mallett, you’ve simply no idea how hateful it is for me to be talking in this way about my husband, but it was such a very difficult position for both of us, wasn’t it? I am sure that you, in your profession, learn to look on these things in such a much more broad-minded way than other people would—Well, I promised Charles I’d do what I could for him, and I did try to help him in lots of ways, but there was so little I could do. I never had any money to speak of to give him. Pompey was very generous in a way, but he always wanted to know where the money had gone to, and it was really most difficult for me. And for Charles, too, of course. Poor fellow, what could he do?”
“He could have divorced you, of course, and got enormous damages from any jury,” said Mallett impatiently.
He looked at Mrs. Eales as he spoke, and something in her expression prompted him to add: “Or couldn’t he?”
“No, Mr. Mallett,” she answered in a voice that was hardly more than a whisper. “That is just what—he—could—not. Oh!” she went on in a sudden passionate outburst, “I do think our divorce laws are the most horribly unjust things that ever were invented! Simply made to make people unhappy and force them to break the law if they’re going to look respectable! As if a poor creature like that counted as being alive at all, after all these years in a madhouse! Why doesn’t someone do something about it, I want to know?”
Mallett heard this rigmarole out with an impassive countenance. When it was over, he said in his most matter-of-fact tone:
“Captain Eales couldn’t divorce you because he was married already?”
“Yes.”
“His first wife being in a lunatic asylum?”
“Yes.”
“So that your marriage to him was invalid and bigamous?”
“Yes—and now I suppose it’s all got to come out.” She was weeping now—or at all events, going through the motions of weeping with great virtuosity.
“Possibly,” said Mallett. “But I am investigating murder, not bigamy. Do you feel strong enough to answer any more questions?”
Mrs. Eales raised her head from the cushions in which she had hidden it and began to powder her nose with great vigour.
“Yes. Please go on,” she said. “I’m sorry to have been so silly, but you do understand how very, very hard things have been for me, don’t you, Mr. Mallett?”
“Quite,” said the inspector, feeling as he did so that it was a singularly inadequate answer. “Now,” he went on, “I must ask you this: when did you first know that your husband was already married?”
“Not when I married him,” she answered quickly. “I swear that!”
“When, then?”
“Oh, quite lately—less than two years ago.”
“I see. Then it was after you had come to live with Mr. Ballantine?”
“Yes.”
Mallett pursed his lips. He thought he saw light.
“Was it Mr. Ballantine who told you?” he demanded.
She nodded. “I believe he’d known about it all along,” she muttered half to herself.
“And I suppose,” the inspector pursued, “he told you about it when your—when Captain Eales began to threaten divorce proceedings?”
She did not answer. Mallett had no need to press for a reply. The situation was quite clear to him now. Obviously the couple had marked down Ballantine as their prey from the start. Eales had allowed or encouraged his “wife” to ensnare the financier, with the intention, from the first, of making him pay dearly for his pleasure. But Ballantine had been too clever for him. A man in his position would have ample means of investigating the history of anyone he pleased, and when the blackmailing demands began he calmly called the bluff, and threatened the would-be petitioner with exposure as a bigamist. It was a trick quite in keeping with all that he, Mallett, had heard of Ballantine’s character. Only one point remained obscure. Was Mrs. Eales telling the truth when she declared her ignorance of her husband’s first marriage? If so, perhaps she was as much the victim of his plot as Ballantine had been intended to be. In the upshot, she had chosen to stay with Ballantine, enjoying all the comforts he could provide, while Eales was left out in the cold, an outwitted, impoverished, furiously angry man—a man with murder in his heart, perhaps. “But why wait two years?” Mallett asked himself, and could find, at the moment, no answer.
He turned to Mrs. Eales again.
“In spite of this disclosure, you went on helping your husband as far as you could?” he asked.
She nodded. “He was my husband, you see. I couldn’t let an accident like that make any difference, could I?”
Mallett with difficulty suppressed a smile. The naïveté of the reply was disarming. He went on:
“And what exactly has your husband been doing during these two years?”
She shrugged her shoulders. “I never knew exactly,” she said lightly. “He used to sell things on commission a good deal, I think. He tried the motor trade for a time, I know. Then it was silk stockings—anything that offered. He was always dreadfully hard up.”
“Where was he living?”
“Oh . . . different places, I suppose.”
“Including this one—when Mr. Ballantine was away?”
“No. He’d only come here during the daytime when he knew Pompey would be out. It was a little difficult, of course. Very often we’d have a meal together, and if he had any work to do he could do it here.”
The inspector looked round the room. “Here?” he asked.
“In Pompey’s study, I mean.”
“But since Mr. Ballantine’s death, he has been living in this flat, has he not?”
“Oh, yes,” answered Mrs. Eales brightly. “But of course that’s different, isn’t it?”
Mallett expressed no opinion. Mrs. Eales’ ideas of propriety were altogether beyond him, and he was thankful that an investigation into them was not within his province. Instead, he rose and said: “Will you show me the study, please?”
* * *
“I’m afraid there’s nothing much to see here,” said Mrs. Eales. “Pompey never kept any private papers here. He used to bring back papers and things from the office to work on them, but he always took them away next morning.”
They were standing in the study, a small, sparsely furnished room, which was in marked contrast to the one they had just quitted. An open desk was innocent of papers, except for a few clean sheets of writing-paper. Some of these, the inspector noticed, bore the address of the flat, others the headings of the various companies with which Ballantine had been associated.
“Of course, I never knew what work he did,” Mrs. Eales went on. “He kept everything in a big attaché case, and that was always locked.”
Mallett forbore to ask how she came to know this. Evidently Ballantine had taken no chances with the lady of his choice.
“I see there is a typewriter over there,” he remarked. “Did Mr. Ballantine use that?”
“Yes.”
“Captain Eales, too?”
“Sometimes.”
“May I use it now?” He eyed her narrowly as he spoke.
“Yes, of course,” she replied, obviously surprised at his request.
Mallett took a sheet of the notepaper which bore the name of the London and Imperial Estates Company, and painfully, for he was no expert at the craft, hammered out from memory a replica of the letter which had sent him on his journey to Brighton.