An Afternoon to Kill

by Shelley Smith

  ‘For one moment Robert’s eyes widened as though he was going to do something incredibly violent, and then he gave me a terrible look, a smile I shall never forget:

  ‘“You fixed this up!” he said. “And I walked into it neatly, didn’t I? You see, I thought it would be quite safe to trust my own sister.”

  ‘“Robert, I didn’t,” I said faintly. “I swear I knew nothing about it.” I wrung my hands.

  ‘Mr Pierce said, “I hope you’ll come quietly, sir, and not upset the lady by making a scene.”

  ‘People were already beginning to stare inquisitively at our table. I hid my burning cheeks in my hands.

  ‘“Mr Pierce,” I said in a shaking voice as he passed me with Robert, “how did you know? Even if you just followed me, how could you possibly know whom I was meeting?”

  ‘“I saw this,” said the policeman, laying before me on the table a tiny snipped-out newspaper cutting that I did not have to read. I knew what it said.

  ‘“ROBERT, please meet me Liverpool St Station, Thursday, 11.30 a.m. under the clock. Shall be wearing white rose for you. BLANCHE.”

  ‘So I had been to blame after all. Now I had lost Robert altogether. I did not know where they had taken him. And I knew I could never expect him to respond to an appeal of mine again. Tears were still dripping through my fingers when Harry came back and found me, and took me home again.

  ‘However, I did see Robert once more. It was at the resumed inquest. My heart nearly stopped when they said, “Call Robert Sheridan!” and he came in looking sullen and bitter.

  ‘He was sworn in and the Coroner began by asking him if he was the son of Edward Sheridan.

  ‘“Yes.”

  ‘“You have not lived at home for some years?”

  ‘“That is correct.”

  ‘“Exactly how long is it that you’ve been away?”

  ‘“Eight years.”

  ‘“What made you leave home?”

  ‘“I quarrelled with my father.”

  ‘“Did he — turn you out?”

  ‘“No, I ran away.”

  ‘“Did you hold any communication with your family during that time?”

  ‘“No.”

  ‘“Could they have got into communication with you if they had so wished?”

  ‘“No. They did not know where I was.”

  ‘“I see. Then am I right in suggesting that you had no means of knowing that your mother was dead or that your father had married again?”

  ‘“Yes.”

  ‘“To turn to recent events. You decided to return to England, and shortly after your arrival you went down to Essex to visit your home. Will you tell the jury in your own words what then occurred?”

  ‘“I asked to see my father,” said Robert with a weariness as of a tale too often repeated, “but when he knew who it was, he refused to see me. So I asked to see Mrs Sheridan, meaning my mother. The maid said she was in the garden, and I went to look for her, thinking to surprise her. Instead I found this woman — I hadn’t the ghost of an idea who she was — half-lying on the seat, and it didn’t require any medical knowledge to see that she was dead.”

  “Can we establish the time of this discovery?”

  ‘“It was a quarter after four when I rang the bell of the house, so it could hardly have been much more than half after, I should imagine.”

  ‘“Pray continue. What happened then?”

  ‘“I vamoosed p.d.q.”

  ‘“I beg your pardon?” said the Coroner.

  ‘“I mean I did a bunk.”

  ‘“Why did you not get help or at least tell the household?”

  ‘“I was scared.”

  ‘“So you ran away?”

  ‘“Yes.”

  ‘“Did you touch her or move the body at all?”

  ‘“What should I want to touch her for? I could see she was dead.”

  ‘“Is it a fact that you are wanted by the police in Canada?”

  ‘“Yes.”

  ‘“And it was in fact less from fear of being connected with Mrs Sheridan’s death in some way than of being recognised by the police of this country, that made you flee?”

  ‘“Yes,” said Robert. And it was only when he turned to go that I realised why he kept his hands behind him all the time — it was because they were braceleted together. My heart burned with shame and grief within me. I thought, would these shameful disclosures never end? I was thankful Papa was not here; he had been excused from attending by a medical certificate.

  ‘The Coroner had established that Sophia was already dead by half past four. The cyanide of potassium from Harry’s poison-cupboard in the dark-room was brought out and there were deadening arguments I could not follow about quantities, measured in grains. Then various chemists were called and testified that none of the preparations bought from them by the deceased had contained prussic acid in any form.’

  ‘One of them was shown a box of digestive powders and admitted they were put up by himself. They contained principally, he said, magnesia and soda bicarbonate. They were quite harmless. One powder tipped on the tongue and slowly dissolved in the mouth after meals; the dose to be repeated if relief was not obtained. Mr Pierce produced for the chemist the little square of paper that had fluttered from Sophia’s skirt and the chemist identified it as the paper he used for his powders.

  ‘The Coroner said since, as the doctor had testified, the deceased could not possibly have taken the powder after the cyanide of potassium, she must have taken it before. The jury had then to decide how the cyanide was administered — in what vessel or container — and whether it could have been self-administered, in these circumstances. They must take into consideration the state of mind of the deceased at the time, and also bear in thought that although the police had searched the surroundings very thoroughly, it was a possibility that the capsule, or whatever the cyanide had been contained in, might have fallen and rolled into some cranny where it had not yet come to light. Would they be justified in ruling out the possibility of suicide? And so on.

  ‘Eventually the foreman of the jury stood up and said:

  ‘“In accordance with the evidence we find the deceased died of cyanide poisoning, there is not sufficient evidence to determine how it was administered, but we think it must have been administered of deliberate intent by some person or persons as yet unknown.”

  ‘A verdict of Wilful Murder! I had not expected that, and I hardly knew how to get out of the courtroom on Oliver’s arm. I had a terrified feeling we were going to be harried and persecuted by old Mrs Falk.

  ‘I wanted to creep into the earth and hide. I could not imagine what was going to happen to us all now. There had been a MURDER in the family! We would be haunted by the malignant dead for the rest of our lives, it seemed.

  ‘To begin with, the shock smoothed out all our jagged irritability. It had the strange effect of drawing us closer to one another in spirit, of uniting us against the world in a deep sympathy born of outrageous and unmentionable fear — it made us kind to one another as people were kind during the war. One went to sleep at night and woke up the next morning to a sense of perpetual accusation by unseen eyes. One wondered how long this lacuna of waiting could last, one wondered how much more of it one could possibly endure; yet all the while one dreaded that it would come to an end, with all one’s apprehension of ultimate horror. Anything rather than that, one prayed; better this torment for the rest of one’s life. The horror of the future hung over the present and made it intolerable, while its ultimate hidden shape advanced inexorably, minute by minute, like a monster in a nightmare,’ said Miss Hine.

  CHAPTER TEN

  A WREATH OF CARNATIONS

  ‘What was utterly horrible to me,’ went on Miss Hine after a moment, ‘was that I had lost all contact with Father. He did not come within our charmed circle of kindness. He avoided us all with a kind of horror. I t
hink he was afraid. What he must have been pondering night and day was the unpleasing problem of Sophia’s blatant infidelity. He tortured himself with wanting, and dreading, to know who her lover had been. And certainly the obvious answer was one of the two men she had mostly been with during his absence: in a word, either Harry or Oliver.

  ‘You can picture the painfulness of the situation for him. To be betrayed by his own son had an ominously Biblical threat to it. It would be a catastrophe without solution. But would it be any better to find the adulterer one’s own son-in-law, the husband of one’s favourite child? He was afraid, I suppose, that I should read his fear in his eyes, and recognise the origin of it. So he avoided us all. Except Lucy. Little blonde adorable Lucy was safe. She was still a child, still confident, still natural, still wholly innocent and untouched by the destroying passion. I think her simple chatter soothed and diverted his mind.

  ‘She and Edgar of course did not go to the funeral. The rest of us attended the bleak little ceremony. It was to be as quiet and as hurried as possible. It would have been a farce to make a spectacle of our mourning for the public. Clap up the whole business and have done with it as hastily as was compatible with dignity, I think we all felt. There were to be no mourners, no flowers, and by special arrangement with the vicar the funeral was to take place before early Communion, at seven o’clock in the morning, so that no one else could be present.

  ‘At the best of times funerals are desolate experiences. But at that hour, in those circumstances, on a chilly morning in late September, when fingers and noses were nipped by the first frosts, that were resolved into diamond fragments beading the webs slung between the broadleaved green spires by the lychgate, there was something harsh about the scene, like a crude woodcut or Courbet’s painful Funeral at Ornans. A mist was coming in off the sea and we stood huddled in our black by the wet yellow clay, looking pinched and dejected.

  ‘I thought how pathetically new and bare the sand-coloured coffin looked as it swayed towards us on the pallbearers’ shoulders, and how I should hate to be shut away in something so unfriendly. I have said there were to be no flowers, but as they lowered the coffin, a large wreath of scarlet carnations slipped tipsily to the ground. I stole a frightened glance at Oliver. For who else would have dared to do such a thing against Papa’s express orders? And I realised at once that by the mere doing of it he was declaring as clearly as words that the dead woman had been to him something more than the cousin-relationship they had pretended. I dared not look at Papa. But when Oliver at last turned his eyes towards mine I saw that his bewilderment matched my own.

  ‘The vicar blew his nose, adjusted his pince-nez, and began reading the service by the graveside in a hurried undertone, rather as if he was checking his laundry-list. Perhaps he was only afraid of catching cold, but it made the business more ignoble than it was already.

  ‘It was as they swung the coffin down into the grave that a sound behind me made me turn, and I saw them — standing behind us a little way away, as though we had the prior claim! Mrs Livingstone and Mrs Falk.

  ‘Mrs Livingstone had a handkerchief to her face, but Mrs Falk was glaring at us baldly above her twisted cynical mouth. Of course the wreath was hers; she could not know and would not care that to us the hypocrisy of flowers struck an unseemly note.

  ‘They stood there in our path awaiting us as we came away. Mrs Falk’s voice rose harsh and clamant on the still air:

  ‘“A pity our first meeting should be such a sad occasion, Mr Sheridan.”

  ‘He had only just replaced his tall hat and now he bared his head again, which had so thickened with white in these last days. Plainly he had no idea who she was and was too engrossed in his thoughts even to wonder; he would have passed her by, but she halted him with a hand on his sleeve.

  ‘“You don’t know who I am!” she said with a queer sort of triumph.

  ‘He said:

  ‘“Madam, you cannot know, but you are intruding upon a private interment.”

  ‘I darted forward:

  ‘“Papa, this is Mrs Falk. Sophia’s mother,” I said urgently.

  ‘“Your mother-in-law, my dear, dear boy,” she said with the ludicrous effect of a crocodile weeping over its prey.

  ‘A look of disgust passed across Papa’s stern impassive features and did not escape her sharp old eyes.

  ‘“I taught Sophia to be ashamed of me,” she said with that familiar arrogant thrust of her brown protruding jaw, “that’s why you never met me before. It would have frightened you away, eh?” she leered. She chumbled for a while, creaking into another phase like a car shifting gears. “But now, my dear boy, our loss has brought us together. You are all I have left in the world,” she said, the old lips puckering and folding.

  ‘“What is it you want from me, madam?” Papa asked with grim patience.

  ‘“For Sophia’s sake,” she mumbled. “She would have wanted you to — ”

  ‘Papa looked at her with hatred.

  ‘“I owe Sophia nothing,” he said harshly. “I have paid my debt to her fully and finally. Let me pass, madam!”

  ‘“An old woman ... ” she whimpered after him.

  ‘We scuttled after him, eager to escape. But at the lychgate I glanced behind me and saw her leaning once again on Mrs Livingstone’s arm, staring after us with so malign an expression that my flesh goose-skinned all over.’

  ‘What did she want?’ asked Mr Jones, puzzled.

  ‘Did I not make it clear? She wanted money. Sophia had been keeping her all the time on Papa’s money. She was frightened about what was to become of her now, naturally enough. But the money had been eased from Papa’s pockets on other pretexts; it is no difficult matter for an adored young wife to get money from her husband for pretty clothes, but not many husbands are so eager to support a mother-in-law. Sophia was clever, she managed to get the pretty clothes too,’ Miss Hine explained.

  ‘I should have thought Mr Bridgewater would have been a much simpler problem for the old lady to tackle?’

  ‘Oliver? I quite agree. Unfortunately, however, Oliver hadn’t any money. It would have been useless to blackmail him. She tried that later,’ said Miss Hine drily.

  ‘It was surely a little crude of her to try and rush your father into it there and then, before she had even met him properly and while they were at the very grave-side?’ he suggested.

  ‘She was not a clever person though she was endowed with abundant cunning. And remember, this was the second time she had tried to approach him, she was beginning to lose her nerve a little; she made a wild grab and missed!’ The old lady slipped a striped cushion behind her head and closed her eyes,

  Mr Jones waited politely. At last he said tentatively that he hoped he hadn’t tired her.

  ‘Not at all,’ she said without opening her eyes. I’m thinking.’

  ‘Thinking?’

  ‘About what happened next,’ she explained.

  The cricket in its little paper cage resumed its singing, as if to fill the silence.

  Presently Miss Hine opened her clear blue eyes and said:

  ‘Harry went up to business as usual after breakfast that day. It would hardly have been decent for Papa to go. Instead he took Lucy with him and went for a long tramp across the flats and salt marshes. She came back with the guilty smile and richly glowing averted eyes of the mischief-maker. I wondered what she had been saying to Papa. She ran up to the nursery. Papa followed her more slowly. But when I went up later, Lucy was alone, curled in the big cane chair in front of the nursery fire with Strickland’s Queen Elizabeth open in her hand. As soon as she saw me she became deeply absorbed in it and did not hear me call her name. I put my hand on her shoulder.

  ‘“Lucy! What are you up to?” I said.

  ‘The shoulder shrugged under my hand.

  ‘“You can see — reading.”

  ‘“You know very well what I mean, Lucy,” I sai
d. “You’ve been up to something with Papa.”

  ‘She bit her lip and flirted the pages of her book impatiently.

  ‘“Oh, Blanche, do let me alone! I want to get on with this. I’ve got to do three chapters for Miss Hughes tomorrow.”

  ‘“What was Papa catechising you about?” I demanded.

  ‘“Why don’t you ask him, if you want to know?” she said pertly.

  ‘As soon as Harry returned from Town, Papa sent for him. I felt anxious and waited about quarter of an hour for him to come down and tell me about it. It was so long since Papa had wanted to speak to any of us except Lucy. After a while I went out to take a turn in the garden. It was while I was pacing to and fro, lost in my thoughts, that I was roused by a wild shriek from the house, and I looked up to see Harry’s face contorted with fury as he shook Lucy by the shoulders so that her head wobbled helplessly. It was from her that the shrieks came as she pressed back against the sill.

  ‘“Let me go! Let me go!" she yelled; while Harry shouted: “You little devil! You wicked little devil!”

  ‘I tried to call, “Harry, don't!" But I was too late. I don’t know what happened. I could not see. I only saw Lucy’s long tresses spread out upon the air and her body slowly turning, first like some great trussed bird and then the arms and legs unfolding in the pale evening light like the incredible limbs of some groping prehistoric insect. There came from her a thin deflated scream before she hit the ground.

  ‘She lay on the path, motionless.

  ‘“Lucy!” I said, kneeling beside her, my face blurred with tears. I thought she was dead, until she began to groan. I dared not touch her. I looked up to where Harry still stood at the window, transfixed, white as a clock in the gathering twilight.

  ‘“Harry!” I called softly. “Run quickly — ”

  ‘“Have I killed her?” he said in a dead voice.

  ‘“She’s still alive, but she’s unconscious. You must get help at once.”