Frank laughed.
‘It’s an ingenious and fascinating tale, but of course it would be impossible to prove any of it. And even your ingenuity would be strained to find a reason for the murder of Mrs Graham!’
She shook her head.
‘It was not, of course, premeditated. Of the three, or perhaps we may say four, suspects, there are only two against whom there is any evidence. In the case of Mr Carey there is Mrs Traill’s statement that she heard Mrs Graham call out “How dare you, Nicholas Carey!” at a time which must have been very close to that of the murder, and when according to his own account he would have been at some considerable distance. This is evidence that Mrs Graham returned to the garden after her daughter had taken her in, and that she became aware of an intruder whom she took to be Nicholas Carey. It is no proof at all that it was Nicholas Carey. The second suspect is Mrs Harrison. As late as seven o’clock on Tuesday evening her diamond ring was undamaged. At ten o’clock on Wednesday morning one of the stones was missing. In the interval Mrs Graham had been murdered. Later the missing stone is found in a crack at the entrance to the gazebo and Mrs Harrison goes to extravagant lengths to provide herself with an alibi for Tuesday night. Mr Worple must come in for some suspicion, but there is nothing that really connects him with the crime, and in both his case and Mrs Harrison’s it is difficult to imagine what would take them to the gazebo at such an hour, unless of course they had an assignation there.’
He laughed.
‘A little far-fetched, don’t you think?’
‘Perhaps. And the motive for murder would be a weak one. But in Mr Blount’s case he could have had a quite compelling reason for silencing Mrs Graham. It is obvious that he had no opportunity of carrying out a really thorough test in the neighbourhood of the gazebo. When he came to view the house he doubtless went into the garden, but Miss Graham would certainly have accompanied him. I do not know to what extent a divining rod could be employed without its being plainly in evidence, but anyone who contemplated sinking a large sum of money in a project of this kind would certainly wish to make the strictest possible tests before committing himself.’
‘So Blount went to the gazebo to wave his divining rod and make sure of the gold?’
‘I will not go farther than to say that he might have gone there for such a purpose.’
‘And then?’
‘He knows that the household at The Lodge keeps early hours. What he could not know was that Mr Carey and Miss Graham would be meeting in the gazebo at half past ten, and that their meeting would be interrupted by Mrs Graham. Owing to this, she was awake at an hour when she should have been safely asleep. I think he must have used a torch – no doubt with great caution – and I think she must have seen it from the bathroom window. Certainly something took her up the garden again in a great hurry. She reaches the gazebo and calls out. You have to imagine the effect on the person whom she has surprised. He takes her by the throat, perhaps to stop her screaming. The rest follows.’
Frank nodded.
‘A good tale, and even a likely one! And not one single solitary shred of evidence to put before a jury! But in Carey’s case – well, I think it would be touch and go for him, depending on who was briefed for the defence and upon just what impression he made in the witness box.’
‘And if you were on such a jury, which way would your vote go?’
He laughed.
‘That would be telling!’
She said demurely,
‘I should very much like to be told.’
‘Very well, strictly between you and me I don’t think Carey did it. From what I have heard I should imagine she would have been an appalling mother-in-law, but I shouldn’t think he would go to the length of murdering her to avoid the relationship – too much awkwardness all round, and not enough incentive. He was marrying the girl anyhow, and as Mrs Graham had already found him in the gazebo once, it really didn’t matter whether she walked into him again.’
He received a look of intelligent commendation.
‘That is precisely the argument I should have put forward myself. But to return to the Blounts. I feel extremely anxious on her account. If he becomes seriously alarmed as to what she may have overheard, I fear for her safety. She is in just that vague shocked condition which would make it comparatively easy to stage an accident. She is, in fact, in a frame of mind conducive either to accident or suicide. And there would be no proof that it was not just a case of another neurotic woman laying down the burden which she feels no longer able to carry. Of course as long as she is here and in a guest house…’
He interrupted her.
‘They have left the guest house. I called in there on my way up, and they had gone. All very sudden and unpremeditated. Miss Madison was put out enough to want to blow off steam, and she told me all about it. It seems two of the guests were alarmed by Mr Blount calling out in his sleep last night. She said she just mentioned it to him when he came in in the early afternoon and he didn’t say anything then, but a little later he came down and said he had been called away in a hurry, upon which he telephoned for a taxi, paid the bill, and departed to catch the four-thirty. She seemed to think that he had taken offence.’
Miss Silver was looking exceedingly grave.
‘Did she say anything about Mrs Blount?’ He nodded.
‘She said she didn’t look as if she was fit to travel.’
THIRTY-EIGHT
THE BLOUNTS TRAVELLED by a slow train. It stopped at a great many stations, and every time it stopped people got in or got out. Sometimes the compartment was so crowded that Mrs Blount felt as if she couldn’t breathe. The morning had been cold, but the sun had come out and the afternoon was muggy. Most of the people who were travelling were far too warmly dressed, but nobody seemed to want to have a window open. The air became heavy with the smell of moth-ball and warm people and tobacco smoke. Mrs Blount shut her eyes, because when she tried to keep them open everything kept slipping out of focus. She couldn’t see how ill she looked – those pale eyelids closed and the dark marks like bruises underlining them. With her head tipped back and her colourless lips fallen apart, it really did seem as if those drooping lids might never rise again. Mr Blount in the opposite seat was stirred to anger. What did she want to go and make a show of herself like that for? Why couldn’t she behave like any of the other women in the compartment? There was one of them reading just the kind of rubbishy paper Millie was so fond of. Another was sucking peppermints, and a thin wiry woman in spectacles had got up quite a brisk argument with the person next to her. He leaned forward and touched Millie on the knee.
‘Here, you’d better not go to sleep, had you? You always say it gives you a headache if you sleep in the train.’
She started, looked at him nervously, and spoke in an undertone.
‘I just felt giddy.’
He began to wish he had left her alone. But perhaps it was all for the best. If anyone was going to remember seeing them, it would be recalled that her behaviour had been odd, and that he had been solicitous for her comfort. He said in his most agreeable voice,
‘Oh, well, you must do just what makes you most comfortable, my dear.’
She knew why he spoke to her like that. He was never sharp or angry with her in front of people. He had been the same with his first wife, the one who fell under a train. There had been some talk about that. He wasn’t there when it happened – or he wasn’t supposed to be there. And no one could say they had ever heard them quarrel. She shut her eyes again and tried not to think about Lucy Blount who had fallen under a train nearly four years ago.
Sid hadn’t told her where they were going yet, but she thought that it would be Cleat. His grandfather was dead, and his Aunt Lizzie lived on in the old thatched cottage which visitors always thought so picturesque. Sid often did quite well out of taking pieces out of stock and putting them into the cottage – a chair, or a table, or some china figures. Visitors used to see them, the table and a chair outside i
n a casual sort of way, and the figures up in the window close to the glass. They would pay good money and go off as pleased as Punch, thinking they had got a bargain. Lizzie Pardue was very good at selling things like that. She was daily help at the Vicarage, a little bit simple but a good worker. She didn’t know anything about the things Sid brought down for her to sell only what he told her, so that the people who bought them just thought she had no idea of the value which she hadn’t, and that she was a simple soul who had never been out of a village in her life which was perfectly true.
They had to change twice before they got to Cleat. It was only the third time that Millie Blount had been there. A faint reassurance came to her as Lizzie Pardue opened the door of the thatched cottage and made them welcome. Sid must have rung up the Vicarage and said they were coming, because their rooms were all ready, and a nice meal too. He must have done it at the station when he left her in the ladies’ room and they were waiting for their train. The reassurance came from the homely surroundings and from Lizzie Pardue herself. Sid took after his mother’s people. Lizzie had the same florid colouring, the thickset build, the strong arms and hands, but there the resemblance ended. Her features were soft and blurred and her eyes were very kind. Kindness – that was the thing you noticed about her at once, and went on noticing. She had a shy half hesitating look for Sid’s wife who was still a stranger, and a soft almost whispering manner of speech. Mrs Blount didn’t say to herself in so many words that Sid wouldn’t try anything on in front of his Aunt Lizzie, but there was that kind of feeling in her mind. She ate a good supper, and thought that she would sleep.
There were three bedrooms in the cottage. Lizzie had the one which looked to the front. The big double bed was the one in which her parents had slept all through their married life. When old Mr Pardue died she had moved in quite simply and as a matter of course. The cottage belonged to her now and all the furniture, so it was only right she should have the best room. The other two bedrooms were small, with narrow truckle beds.
Millie Blount would rather have slept on the floor than have shared a room with Sid. She didn’t feel as if she could ever share a room with Sid again. Suppose he was to call out in his sleep like he had in Miss Madison’s Pink Room. Suppose he was to say what he had said before. Or words. Everything in her shook at the thought of it. But here she could lie down on a narrow bed and pull the bedclothes right up over her ears and she wouldn’t hear anything at all. The cottage was strongly built, with thick walls, and the thatch all over it to deaden sound. Even if Sid called out she wouldn’t hear what he said.
Just before she went to sleep it came to her that he might want her to have a room of her own just as much as she wanted it herself. He might want to be alone at night just as much as she wanted it, because then if he talked or called out there would be no one to hear him. This comforting thought went with her into a deep and dreamless sleep.
It wasn’t till next day when Lizzie Pardue had left them alone and gone off to the Vicarage that it occurred to Millie Blount to wonder why they had come down to Cleat, but she knew better than to ask any questions. If she could have heard Lizzie talking to the Vicar’s wife it might have started her worrying again. Lizzie had worked for Mrs Field for a great many years and felt quite at home with her. They were making beds together, and she had a lot to say about her nephew Sid and his wife.
‘Very worried about her he is, Mrs Field. That’s why they’re down here. “Country air,” he says, “and your cooking, Auntie Liz,” he says, “and if that don’t make her well, nothing will. Right down melancholy, that’s what she is.” And what with his first wife throwing herself under a train, poor thing, it’s only natural he should take it to heart.’
Mrs Field said,
‘Did she throw herself under a train? How dreadful! No, the sheet isn’t straight, Miss Pardue – it wants pulling up on your side.’
Lizzie pulled it up.
‘She threw herself right under the Brighton express. Sid he took it to heart something dreadful. She left him a nice bit of money, but it don’t make up for losing your wife. And he said to me last night, “I’d never get over it if anything like that was to happen again, Aunt Liz,” he says.’
‘Miss Pardue, that’s the Vicar’s pillow you’ve got, not mine. You don’t mean to say there’s any reason to suppose…’
Miss Pardue shook her head in a mournful way.
‘There’s no getting from it she’s melancholy. And I’m sure there isn’t a kinder husband than Sid anywhere. But he’s worried, I can see that, and he says she talks funny.’
‘The eiderdown is behind you, Miss Pardue. How do you mean, “She talks funny”?’
Lizzie Pardue picked up the eiderdown and spread it across the bed.
‘It’s the things she says, and the way she says them if you know what I mean. Sid don’t like talking about it, but when it comes to saying she don’t think she can go on and he’d be better off without her, well, it gives you a bit of a turn, what with poor Lucy throwing herself under a train and all.’
‘She ought to see a doctor,’ said Mrs Field in her most decided voice.
In the cottage with the thatched roof Mrs Blount was sitting at the kitchen table peeling potatoes. There were some sprouts to see to too. Sid had picked them and brought them in, and she was very pleased to get everything forward so that there would be as little as possible for Aunt Liz to do when she came home at half past twelve. At the other end of the table Sid had a bottle of ink and a writing-pad. He got out his pen and dipped it.
He hadn’t written more than a line or two before he stopped and began to rub his thumb and the side of his hand. She kept her eyes on the potatoes so that she needn’t watch him. He didn’t like being watched, and she didn’t like looking at his hands. They were strong and coarse, and there was hair on them. They frightened her. He began to write again, and went on to the foot of the page. Then he said, ‘Ow!’ and wrung his hand with the pen in it. A blob of ink splashed down on to the white scrubbed table. Lizzie Pardue wasn’t going to like that. Mrs Blount got up to get a cloth, but he shouted to her not to fuss and she didn’t dare. She went and sat down again, and there he was, nursing his hand and saying he had put the thumb joint out, and how was he to finish his letter.
‘And it’s got to catch the post whether or no. There’s a chap I half said I’d go into a deal with, but I’ve thought better of it. Heard something about him as a matter of fact, and he’s not the sort I want to get mixed up with.’
Mrs Blount was very much surprised. They had been married three years, and she never remembered his telling her anything about his business before. She didn’t say anything, because she didn’t know what to say. He went on grumbling about his hand.
‘It’s no good thinking I can hold a pen, because I can’t. And that letter’s got to catch the post. You’ll just have to make the best job of it you can. I’ll tell you what to say. You’d better come round here and take this chair. And wash your hands! I don’t want my business correspondence all messed up with dirt off those potatoes!’
There wasn’t any dirt on the potatoes, because of course they had been scrubbed before she sat down to peel them, but she didn’t say anything.
She went and washed, and he swore at her for being so long. By the time she was set down and had the pen in her hand she was shaking. He put the block in front of her with a clean page on it. He had finished the first sheet and laid it aside. She said, doing her best to keep her voice steady,
‘Do I put a 2 at the top?’
He swore at her.
‘You don’t put anything down but what I tell you! And don’t start too near the top. There’ll be only a sentence or two to come, and it’ll look better that way.’
She sat waiting for him to tell her what to write. He stood over her, watching everything she did, and began to dictate. It made her so nervous that her hand shook worse than ever. She wrote in stumbling letters:
‘I can’t go on with it. It�
��s no use. I don’t feel I can.’
He was looking over her. When he saw what she had written he pulled the block away and swore again.
‘How do you think I can send a scrawl like that! I’ll just have to try and get him on the phone!’
He tore the sheet off the block and looked at it. The writing was barely legible, and pulling the block away had made the pen run off at an angle.
He stood behind his wife’s chair and smiled approvingly. He thought that what she had written would do very well.
THIRTY-NINE
JACK HARRISON WAS in a most dazed and uncomfortable frame of mind. He was not a man of marked ability in any direction. He had entered a family business, Harrison and Leman, General Importers, at the age of eighteen, detached himself from them to serve through the first World War, and returned when it was over with a wounded shoulder which still occasionally gave him trouble, and an immense thankfulness at finding himself back in the office. He was not clever, but he was painstaking, courteous, and trustworthy. In due course he became a partner and inherited a considerable fortune from two bachelor uncles. He was universally liked, but after a slightly patronizing manner. At least one woman had cared for him deeply, but he had most unfortunately married Ella Crane. He would have been happy with Emmy Lester and he was not at all happy with Ella, but it never occurred to him that there was anything he could do about it. He did what he could to avoid rows and the occasions for them, but it was uphill work and he wasn’t very good at it.
The Gazebo Page 23