by Ellis Peters
“I understand that your father left his estate in trust for you, dying as he did when you were quite a child. Can you tell me if that trust terminated when you came of age?”
“I know the answer to that one,” she said, mildly astonished, “and it did. I can do whatever damn-fool thing I like with my money now, they can only advise me. Actually it all goes on just the same as before, but that’s the legal position.”
“So if a merger was proposed between Armiger’s and Norris’s it would be entirely up to you to decide whether you wanted to go through with it?”
“Yes,” she said, so quietly that he knew she had heard the further question he had not asked. “He did want that,” she said, “you’re quite right. He’s been working at it for some time. The people at our place weren’t very keen, but he was like the goat in that silly song, and I dare say he’d have busted the dam in the end. But nothing had happened yet, and now it doesn’t arise any more.”
“And what did you want to do?”
“I didn’t want to do anything. I wanted not to know about it, I wanted to be somewhere else, and not to have to think about it at all. I’d have been glad to give it to him and get rid of it, myself, but after all, people work there, a lot of people, and it means more to them than it does to me. One ought not to own something that matters more to other people. If I knew how to set about it, or could persuade Ray Shelley to understand what I wanted, I’d like to give it to them.”
George had a sense of having been drawn into a tide which was carrying him helplessly off course, and yet must inevitably sweep him, in its own erratic channel, towards the sea of truth. He certainly wasn’t navigating. Neither, perhaps, was she, but she swam as to the manner born with this whirling current, its overwhelming simplicity and directness her natural element. She meant every word she said now, there was no doubt of that, and she expected him to accept it as honestly; and confound the girl, that was exactly what he was doing.
Trying to get his feet on to solid earth again, he said: “This idea of uniting the two firms wasn’t a new one, was it? Forgive me if I’m entering on delicate ground, but the general impression is that Mr. Armiger had the same end in mind earlier, and meant to achieve it in a different way, by a direct link between the two families.”
“Yes, he wanted Leslie to marry me,” she said, so simply that he felt ashamed of his own verbosity. She looked up over her empty glass, and he saw deep into the wide-set eyes that were like the coppery purple velvet of butterfly wings. You looked down and down into them, and saw her clearly within the crystal tower of herself, but so far away from you that there was no hope of ever reaching her. “But it was his idea, not ours. You can’t make these things for other people. He ought to have known that. There never was any engagement between Leslie and me.”
A moment of silence, while she looked steadily at him and her cheeks paled a little. He had one more question to ask her, but he let it ride until he had risen to take his leave, and then, turning back as if something relatively unimportant had occurred to him, he asked mildly: “Do you happen to know the terms of Mr. Armiger’s will?”
“No,” she said quickly, and her head came up with a sudden wild movement, the velvet eyes enormous and eager upon his face. He saw hope flame up in her as though someone had lighted a lamp; a word, and something like joy would kindle in the crystal tower of her loneliness. What was it she wanted of him? Beyond the relatively modest needs of her car and her wardrobe and this almost cloistral flat of hers, money seemed to mean very little to her. He had to go through with it now, because he had to know if what he had to tell her was what she wanted to know.
“He’s left everything to you,” said George.
The light in her was quenched on the instant, but that was the least of it. She stood staring at him open-mouthed, and the colour drained slowly from her face. Her knees gave under her, she reached a hand back to grope for the arm of a chair, and sat down dazedly, her ringers clenched together in her lap.
“Oh, no!” said Kitty in a gasping sigh that seemed to contain disappointment and consternation and rage inextricably mingled, and something else, too, a kind of desperation for which no effort of his imagination could account. “Oh, God, no! I hoped he’d never really done what he threatened, or if he had done it I hoped he’d taken it back. I mean about Leslie! He always swore he hadn’t and wouldn’t, but then even if he had he wouldn’t have been able to admit it, you see. And now, Oh, damn him!” she said helplessly. “Why? There was no possible reason, the thing never arose. He knew I didn’t need it, he knew I shouldn’t want it. Why?”
“He had to leave it to someone,” said George reasonably, “and he had a free choice what he did with his own, like everyone else. There’s no need for you to feel responsible for someone else’s deprivation, you know, it was none of your doing.”
“No,” she said dully, and let the monosyllable hang on the air as though she had meant to add something, and then could find no suitable words for what she wanted to say. She got up again resignedly to see him out, punctilious in accompanying him to the door, but all the time with that lost look in her eyes. When the door had closed between them he made three purposeful paces away from it towards the stairs, and two long, silent ones back again. She hadn’t moved from the other side of the door, she was leaning against the wall there, trying to think, trying to get hold of herself. He heard her say aloud, helplessly: “Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God!” in childish reproach, as though she was appealing to an unreasonable deity to see her point of view.
What had he done to her? What was it he’d done? Granted she didn’t want the money, granted she thought it ought to have gone to Leslie, she needn’t have received the news as though it embodied some peculiarly insidious attack upon her. He couldn’t say he hadn’t provoked any interesting reasons, the trouble was he didn’t know how to make sense of them now he’d got them.
He went down the carpeted stairs displeased with himself, almost ashamed, not even trying to make the odd pieces of jigsaw puzzle fit together, since they were so few and so random that no two of them touched as yet; and there, leaning negligently on the Morris, when he reached it, was Dominic.
He was a little out of breath, having run all the way to the car while George was coming down the last flight of stairs; but George was too preoccupied with other things to notice that. The bright inquisitive smile looked all right, the “Hallo, Dad!” sounded all right, and George didn’t look closely.
“Hallo!” he said. “What are you doing here?”
It was the third time Dominic had skipped his school lunch and made do with a snack in the town, in order to have time to walk slowly up and down Church Lane in the hope of catching a glimpse of Kitty. The telephone directory had supplied her address, once she herself had told him her name. He hadn’t yet quite recovered from the shock of strolling past the open door of the block and seeing the unmistakable shape of his father slowly descending the last turn of the stairs; and if it hadn’t been for the sudden inspiration the sight of the car had given him, he would have been running still.
“I’ve been on an errand for Chuck,” he said, mastering his breathing with care. Chuck was the least offensive of the several names by which his house-master was known to the upper school.
“Here?” said George, divining an improbability even where he had no reason to feel suspicious.
“To the rector,” said Dominic firmly, jerking his head towards the corner of the churchyard wall. Blessedly the rector was a governor of the school and chaplain to its cadet corps. “I saw the car and hung around on the offchance. As it’s getting round to half past twelve I thought with a lot of luck you might buy me a lunch.”
On reflection George thought he might. Beer barons may die, but the rest of the world still has to eat. “Get in,” he said resignedly, and took his offspring to a restaurant not far from the school, so that there should be no risk of his being late in the afternoon. “What about Chuck? Can the answer wait?”
“You’re on this murder case, aren’t you?” he said, trying to strike the right note of excited curiosity. “Mummy told me this morning old Armiger was dead. What a turn up! I never said anything to the fellows, naturally, but it leaked in around break, with the milk. It’s all over the town now, they’ve had half a dozen people third-degreed by this time, and one or two arrested.”
“They would,” said George tranquilly. “The number of people who can do this job better than I can, it’s a wonder I ever hold it down at all. Who’s the favourite?”
A sprat to catch a mackerel was fair enough. Dominic trailed his bait and hoped for a rise. “That chap Clayton. I bet you didn’t know he was under notice, did you?”
“The devil he is!” said George, wondering if Grocott had collected this bit of information yet, wondering, too, from which school theorist the item of news had come.
“Then you didn’t know! Old Armiger’s gardener’s son is in our form. There was a blazing row three days ago over hours, Clayton pitched right in and said he wouldn’t stand for being shoved around all hours of the day and night, and Armiger threw it up at him that he’d done time for larceny once and once for receiving a stolen car, and he was bloody lucky to have a job at all, , , “
“Language!” said George mechanically, drawing in to the kerb.
“Sorry; quoting. And then he fired him. Did you know he had a record?”
“Yes, we knew. A record ten years old. Not enough to hang him.”
“It isn’t capital murder,” said Dominic.
“I hope you’re not going to turn into a lawyer in the home,” said George. “I was using a figure of speech.”
He locked the car, and ushered his son before him into the dining-room of The Flying Horse. They found a table in a corner, and settled purposefully over the menu. Bad timing, thought Dominic, vexed. I shall have to come right out and ask.
“Are you on to anything yet?” The ardent face, the earnest eyes, these would pass muster with George; it was Dominic himself who suffered, making this enforced use of a travesty of something so real and so important to him. His father was wonderful, and he did feel a passionate partisan interest in any case his father was handling. But here he was putting on the appropriate face for his own ends, parodying his own adoration, and it caused him an almost physical pain when George grinned affectionately at him, and slapped him down only very gently.
“Just routine, Dom. We’ve hardly begun, there’s a long way to go yet.”
“Who was it you had to see in Church Lane? There aren’t any suspects there, are there?”
After a moment of consideration George said calmly: “I’d been to see Miss Norris. Just as I told you, pure routine. I’m working my way through a whole list of people who were on the premises last night, that’s all.”
“And no real leads yet? I don’t suppose she was able to tell you much, was she?”
“Practically nothing I didn’t know already. Get on with your lunch and stop trying to pump me.”
And that was all he was going to get, for all his careful manipulations. He tried once or twice more, but he knew it was no good. And maybe there was nothing more to extract, maybe this was literally all. But Dominic wasn’t happy. How could he be, with murder passing so close to Kitty that its shadow came between her and the sun?
CHAPTER V.
“Yes,” said Jean Armiger, “I’ve heard the news. It’s in the noon papers, you know. I’ve been expecting you.”
She was a slender dark girl, with short black hair clustering closely round a bold, shapely head. Her face was short, broad and passionate, and her spirit was high. She couldn’t be more than twenty-three or twenty-four. She stood squarely in the middle of her ugly, inconvenient furnished bed-sitting-room on the second floor of Mrs. Harkness’s seedy house in a back street on the edge of town, facing George and the full light from the window, and scared of neither. The slight thickening of her body beneath the loose blue smock had robbed her of her quick-silver lightness and precision of movement, but its unmistakable qualities were there in every motion she made with her hands and head. For some reason, perhaps because Kitty had a way of dimming everyone else around her, George hadn’t expected anyone as attractive as this, or as vivid. Jean, as Wilson had said, was quite a girl. It wasn’t so difficult, after all, to see how Leslie Armiger might contrive to notice her existence, even in Kitty’s presence. He had grown up on brotherly terms with Kitty.
“You’ll understand, I’m sure, that we have routine inquiries to make. Were you at home last night, Mrs. Armiger?”
She curled a lip at the phrase, and cast one flying glance round the room he had dignified by the name. True, there was a cramped make-shift kitchenette out on the landing to be added to the amenities, and a shed in the garden where Leslie was allowed to keep his easel and canvasses and colours. But, home?
“Yes,” she said, forbearing from elaborating on the glance, which had been eloquent enough. “All the evening.”
“And your husband?”
“Yes, Leslie was here, too, except for a little while, he went out about half past nine to post some letters and get a breath of air. He was in the stores packing orders all day yesterday, he needed some fresh air. But it was only for about half an hour.”
“So he was home by ten?”
“I think it was a little before. Certainly by ten.”
“And he didn’t go out again?”
“No. You can check that with him, of course,” she said disdainfully. At this very minute, if all had gone according to plan, Grocott would be asking Leslie Armiger the same questions, discreetly in the manager’s office, at Malden’s, so that the staff, no doubt already agog, shouldn’t jump to the conclusion that he was due to be arrested any moment; but Jean didn’t know that, of course. George wasn’t even sure why he had taken the precaution of arranging these two interviews to take place simultaneously; he had no reason as yet to distrust this young couple rather than any other of the possible suspects, but he had learned to respect his hunches. And if they had no lies to tell he had done them no wrong.
“We shall do that, of course,” he said disingenuously. “Tell me, Mrs. Armiger, have you had any contact with your father in-law since your marriage? Ever seen him or spoken to him?”
“No, never,” she said firmly, with a snap which said plainly that that was the way she had wanted it.
“Nor your husband, either?”
“He hasn’t seen him. He did write to him once, only once, about a couple of months ago.”
“Trying to effect a reconciliation?”
“Asking for help,” said Jean, and bit off the consonant viciously and clenched her teeth on silence.
“With your consent?”
“No!”
She wasn’t going to much trouble to hide her feelings, but she hadn’t intended to spit that negative at him so bitterly. She turned her
head away for a moment, biting her lip, but she wouldn’t take it back or try to soften it now it was out.
“With what result?”
“With no result. He sent a contemptuous answer and refused to do anything for us.” She had been grateful for that, it had salved the fierce pride Leslie had involuntarily injured by making the appeal.
“And there’s been no further approach?”
“None as far as I know. But I’m sure none.”
After some inward debate George told her the terms of Armiger’s will; it seemed a justifiable line of inquiry. “Does that come as a surprise to you, Mrs. Armiger?”
“No,” she said steadily. “Why should it? He had to leave his money to someone, and he had no relatives left that be hadn’t quarrelled with.”
“You didn’t know of this plan of his to make Miss Norris his heiress?”
“All we knew was that Leslie was written off for good, so it no longer concerned us. His father had made that very plain.”
She was turning the narrow wedding ring upon her finger, and George saw that it was loose. The cheek on which the dark hair curled so lustrously was thinner than it should have been, too, perhaps with too much fatigue and worry, carrying the child, running this oppressive, cramped apology for a home and working part-time to eke out the budget; or perhaps with some other strain that gnawed at her from within. Something terrifying and destroying had happened to her when Leslie caved in and wrote to his father, something he might never be able to undo. Thanks to that unrelenting old demon of a father of his, he had another chance to come up to her expectations, if he had it in him; but after that one slip he had to prove it, up to then probably she’d been serenely sure of him. And yet George could see Leslie’s point of view, too. He must love his wife very much, or he wouldn’t have burned his boats for her sake; and to see her fretting here, to think of his son spending the first months of his life here, was surely enough to bring him to heel, however reluctantly. You could even argue that his attitude was more responsible than hers. What was certain was that by that one well-meant gesture he’d come dangerously near to shaking his marriage to pieces.