“Damnable—isn’t it, darling?”
His crutch went tapping away down the corridor. Nora sat down on the nearest chair and cried for quite a long time.
CHAPTER TWENTY
When McGillivray was through with Ellen he had Dennis Harland in.
“I’m sorry to trouble ye. There are just one or two points—”
Dennis got himself into a chair and stretched out a leg. All the contours of his face had sharpened. There was a flush upon his cheeks. His eyes were tired and bright. He said,
“It’s no trouble.” His voice was flat. McGillivray thought he looked as if he had a temperature. He said,
“It’s very obliging of ye. It would be about Mrs. Maquisten’s maid, Ellen Bridling. She appears to have been very devoted to her.”
“Oh, yes.”
“Ye’ll have known her a long time?”
“Ever since I can remember. My aunt brought us all up.”
“When ye say all, ye’ll be meaning—?”
“My cousins, Mrs. Hull and Miss King, and myself.”
“Not Mr. Robert Maquisten or Miss Silence?”
“No.”
“And Mrs. Bridling would no doubt be very much attached to all three of ye?”
Dennis’s smile broke out and changed his face.
“I don’t think she’s the least bit attached to any of us.”
“Not to Miss King?”
The smile became a dry laugh.
“Good lord, no! She hates children, and she loathed having us here. I may say that we reciprocated and did our best to give her good and sufficient cause. She doesn’t love any of us, but if there’s one she dislikes more than the others, it’s Honor.”
“But she was attached to Mrs. Maquisten?”
“Undoubtedly. She’s a sour old crab, but she loved my aunt—I’m quite sure about that.”
“Imphm. And Mrs. Maquisten will have made some provision for her no doubt?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Ye know that for a fact?”
Dennis looked a little surprised.
“Well, yes, I do. My aunt was not at all a secretive person. She enjoyed making wills, and she enjoyed talking about what was in them. Ellen was to have an annuity of three pounds a week.”
“Would she be cognizant of that?”
“I suppose so.”
“Did Mrs. Maquisten vary the amount from time to time?”
“Oh, no, she didn’t do that sort of thing with the staff. Mrs. Deeping was to have two pounds a week, and Ellen three. That was in all the wills. It was just the family legacies she liked having fun and games with. And if you’re thinking would it have been worth Ellen’s while to poison Aunt Honoria, well, it wouldn’t. She got two pounds a week and a fiver at Christmas, and with board and lodging thrown in and a present here and there—well, you can add it up for yourself. She wouldn’t want to come down to a bed-sitting room after bossing it round this house for thirty-five years, quite apart from the fact that in her own vinegar way she really did love my aunt.”
McGillivray thought, “This is a very intelligent young man—and that will be a pleasant change.” Aloud he said,
“Imphm. Would ye say she was truthful?”
“I don’t know that I ever thought about it one way or the other.”
“Would ye say that she’d give an accurate account of a conversation?”
“She has been giving you an account of a conversation?”
“Imphm—with Mrs. Maquisten. Would it be acccurate?”
Dennis sat looking straight in front of him. In the end he said,
“I can’t answer that.”
“With regard to this particular conversation, maybe not. But ye can tell me whether she is a pairson who would repeat a conversation accurately in a general way.”
“I think so.”
McGillivray nodded.
“The less education a pairson has, the more accurately they will repeat—that is, my experience. There’s a sense of drama which education appears to eleeminate. Ye’ll find it in children. They’ll not just tell ye a thing—they’ll act it for ye. It conveys a very veevid impression. Imphm.”
Dennis took a moment. Then he said,
“What impression did Ellen give you?”
“A very veevid one, Mr. Harland.”
“What did she say?”
Looking at him straight and full, McGillivray said,
“She affirrmed that it was Miss Silence whose name was to be cut out of Mrs. Maquisten’s will.”
Dennis had known that it was coming—he had braced himself to hear it said. But there is something about the spoken word which exceeds anticipation. There was in this case the stern warning note in McGillivray’s voice.
He did not wince, but effort drove the flush from his cheeks. He sat there grey and rigid. And then without warning the door opened and Carey came in.
A little across the threshold, she saw McGillivray, checked, and took a half step back. He said,
“Come in, Miss Silence. There’s something I would like to ask ye. Come in and sit down.”
Carey advanced slowly. She was very pale. Unlike Nora, she had used no lipstick. Her black hair made her look paler still. Her eyes between the shading lashes seemed almost as dark. As she came she looked at Dennis. McGillivray saw her draw a quick breath. Then she sat down and transferred her gaze to him.
“What is it?”
“Just a question as to a matter of fact,” said McGillivray. “Have ye a banking account, Miss Silence?”
Her lips just parted to say “No.”
“An account in the Post Office savings bank?”
She shook her head.
“Am I to understand that ye have no financial assets?”
She said in a tired, gentle voice,
“I hadn’t any money except what I brought with me and five pounds that Cousin Honoria gave me.”
“And how much did ye bring with ye?”
“Thirty shillings.”
“Then yer total assets would be six pound ten?”
Dennis Harland said quickly, “For that matter, we’re all in the same boat. We’ve none of us got anything you could call private means except Robert. If they chuck me out of the Air Force, I suppose I shall have a wound pension. Nora’s husband has nothing but his pay—if he’s killed she’ll get about two hundred a year. Honor hasn’t got a halfpenny. My aunt has been extremely generous to us all.”
McGillivray looked at him tolerantly. After a moment he nodded and turned back to Carey.
“Ye’re not so long out of hospital?”
“About a fortnight.”
“And ye were advised to take a rest. For how long?”
“Three months.”
Dennis broke in. “There would be no question of my cousin going to work until she was fit, whatever happened.”
“Would she know that?” said McGillivray. His voice was deep and stern. Without waiting for an answer he pushed back his chair and got up—a big man, loosely built, rather portentous. “Ah well,” he said, “I’ll be back.”
He passed them, went out of the room, and shut the door.
Carey got up too, but it seemed as if the movement had been instinctive, for when she was up she just stood there, doing nothing, saying nothing. She saw Dennis take hold of his crutch and get up too. So there they were, facing one another, quite close together, and not a word to say. It was strange and desolating. They looked at one another, and had nothing to say. She thought how grey he was.
And then suddenly the flush was in his cheeks again, his eyes bright as coals. He said, “Why did you do it?”
Carey stared at him, her face stupid with the shock—no intelligence, no protest—just a blank.
He leaned a little forward, dropping his voice.
“Why did you? You didn’t have to. We’d have looked after you—I’d have looked after you. You might have known.”
She said almost inaudibly, “I don’t know what you mean.�
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They stood staring at each other. When he saw that she was about to speak he turned abruptly and went limping out of the room.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Jeff Stewart came back next day. He arrived on the doorstep of No. 13 at the same time as a thickset elderly man with a heavy, serious face and greying hair which had once been red. As they stood together and waited for the door to open, Jeff wondered who his companion might be. Not so many people would be calling before noon at a house where the mistress lay dead, and it wanted twenty minutes or so of twelve o’clock. His mind was full of Carey, whom he hadn’t seen for ten days, but he couldn’t help wondering who was calling with him. Family? Lawyer? Or a combination of the two? Family lawyer—yes, that would be it.
As the thought went through his mind, Mark Aylwin’s frown deepened. He pressed the bell again. Almost before his hand had time to drop the door swung in, showing Molly, her face so swollen with crying as to be almost unrecognizable. When she saw them both she began to cry again, as noisy and uncontrolled as if she had been half her age. Remembering that this was Thursday, and that Mrs. Maquisten had been dead since Monday night, Jeff wondered whether she had been crying like this all the time, and why. He got a kind of horror quite suddenly.
And then Mr. Aylwin was saying, sternly but not unkindly,
“Now, Molly, control yourself. You mustn’t add to the trouble.”
She gave a convulsive sob. “Oh, sir!”
Jeff turned.
“I expect your business will be with the family. I’ve just come to see Miss Silence.” He turned back again. “Where is she, Molly? Will you let her know.”
There was a fresh storm of sobs.
Mr. Aylwin said, “I think we had better go to the study.” He took Molly by the shoulder and shook her. “Stop crying at once! And tell Mr. Dennis we’re here.”
But the opening of the study door showed Dennis Harland at the writing-table. There was a sheet of paper before him and a pen in his hand. The nib was dry and the sheet blank. He had still that grey, cold look.
Mr. Aylwin went across to him.
“My dear boy—no, don’t get up. I can’t tell you how sorry I am. And that I should have been away—most, most unfortunate.” He moved aside to draw up a chair, leaving Jeff Stewart looking down at Dennis and feeling the horror rise in him.
“I won’t butt in. I expect you have business. I’ll just say how sorry I am and go up and see Carey.”
A muscle twitched in Dennis’s cheek. “Mr. Aylwin is my aunt’s legal adviser. I don’t think you’ve met him.”
“No.” He made a half turn and held out a hand. “How do you do, sir? I’m Jefferson Stewart. I’m some kind of a cousin of Carey’s, and I’m over from the States on Lease-Lend business. I’m very sorry to hear about this. Cousin Honoria was very good to me. Well, you’ll be wanting to talk to Dennis. I’ll go up and see Carey.”
Dennis said in a curious expressionless voice, “You can’t.”
“Why can’t I?”
“Because she isn’t here.”
Jeff stared at him.
“Why isn’t she here?”
“Because she’s been arrested.” He sounded tired. That was all—just rather flat and tired.
The words appeared to produce a numbing effect. Jeff went on staring. “They’ve arrested Carey? What for?”
“For poisoning Aunt Honoria.”
He went back a pace.
“But it’s nonsense!”
“I’m afraid not. She did it.”
“If you’d got two legs, I’d wring your neck for that,” said Jefferson Stewart softly.
Dennis met the dangerous spark in his eyes,
“You’d be saving me a lot of trouble.”
“This is a shock to you, Mr. Stewart. It’s been a shock to everyone. I’ve been away in Scotland, and I’ve only just got back. I can imagine that you don’t find it very easy to believe. It has obviously been a very great shock to Dennis. I must ask you to remember his state of health. Recriminations will not help Carey Silence. I suggest that you sit down and listen to what Dennis has to say. I have myself seen Chief Inspector McGillivray this morning. I have also seen my head clerk, Mr. Hood. I’m afraid there is a very strong case against your cousin.”
Jeff Stewart made no attempt to sit down. He loomed up in the middle of the room, and dominated it with that bright, dangerous gleam in his eye and the soft drawl of his voice.
“What case?” he said.
Aylwin told him, putting the unbelievable accusation into brief, methodical words. The penniless girl, not too sure of her health or her ability to earn her living, a fortune just within her grasp, the prospect of ease and plenty. Then something—nobody knew what—coming up out of the past to wreck it all, and the temptation to save herself and be secure.
When he had done, Jeff Stewart said,
“If Carey wanted money, there was mine. I’ve plenty. We were going to be married. There’s no motive.”
“That will be for the defence.” Aylwin did not look at him. “The case is strong enough, even if the jury believe what you have just said. Two witnesses identify her with the person Mrs. Maquisten would have cut out of her will if she had lived over Monday night.”
Jeff turned away from him.
“You think she did it, Dennis? Why?”
The muscle twitched again.
“She knew about the sleeping-draught—I came down and told her. If I hadn’t done that I could have said she couldn’t have known Aunt Honoria was going to take anything. But she did know. She knew Magda was going out, and that the draught was going to be left for Ellen to give her. I came down and told her the whole thing myself. She had only to walk into the bathroom and put the extra tabloids in.”
“Are you going to tell them that?”
“They haven’t asked me yet.”
“Are you going to tell them?”
Dennis looked away, looked down, stared at the blotting-pad and the blank sheet that lay there. He said,
“She did it.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
When Carey looked back she could see all the things which led up to her arrest. They were quite clear and distinct. One followed upon the other, inexorably, logically. But she stopped short always before the actual moment. It was like the step between life and death. Up to one particular moment you were alive; after that moment you were what people called dead—somewhere else. But would you remember the actual step between these two states? She didn’t think you would. Up to one particular moment and one particular day she was one of millions of other people who had their troubles and their difficulties, but who were free and who could look to the law for protection. Then, with a sudden jarring shock, she had passed a barrier which irrevocably divided her from all these people into a state where the law no longer existed to protect, but to restrain, to punish, and to kill. She could not force her mind to the moment of transition.
Memory took up again on the other side of it. Moments passed—minutes, hours, days, weeks—with a dragging slowness, but somehow outside time. Because in time its divisions are related, linked with the past and with the future. But to Carey there was only now—a present which imprisoned her more surely than her body was imprisoned. Now it was Monday, now Tuesday. Now it was December, now January. It didn’t matter what they called it, it was Now.
There were interruptions—days on which for a brief space the outside world of time broke in. There was the day when she was told that her solicitor was waiting to see her, and when she said she hadn’t got a solicitor the wardress said firmly of course she had, someone would see-to that, and she must come along and talk to him.
Mr. Mordaunt, sitting at one end of a long, bare table, had his first sight of his client as the wardress brought her in, indicated a chair at the other end, and withdrew out of earshot to keep an eye upon her charge through a glass panel in the upper part of the door. He thought Miss Carey Silence very young, very pale. If he knew anything abo
ut it—and having been a warden all through the blitz, he was not without experience—she was suffering badly from shock.
He was about to address her, when she lifted a pair of very beautiful dark blue eyes and said,
“I’m so sorry—I don’t know your name.”
Mr. Mordaunt began to explain himself, but he had not got beyond the name of his firm, when she spoke again.
“I haven’t got any money.”
“You haven’t got to trouble about that, Miss Silence.”
“I have only six pound ten, and that wouldn’t be enough.”
Shock—that was what made people talk like that, straight out of whatever it was they had on their minds. It destroyed the ordinary inhibitions, and they just came out with whatever they were thinking. Could be useful, or precious awkward.
Suppose she started to tell him that she’d done it—people in a state of shock will tell you anything. He began to talk in a hurry.
“Miss Silence, will you listen to me. I can’t stay very long, and there are a number of things I want to say, but before I say any of them let me assure you that you do not have to trouble about the money side of this. If, as we hope, we are able to bring this off, you will yourself have ample means.”
She interrupted quite gently.
“But if you don’t bring me off—”
Her eyes were fixed steadily upon his face. He found it a little disconcerting. He said,
“I should have said at once that a member of your family is making himself responsible.”
“Dennis?”
“Mr. Harland? Well, no.”
She echoed the last word.
“No—Dennis thinks I did it.”
Mr. Mordaunt made haste to block this uninviting path.
“It is not Mr. Harland. It is Mr. Stewart—Mr. Jefferson Stewart.”
Her lids wavered and fell. She leaned back. Very slowly a faint colour stained that very white skin. Very slowly it ebbed again. All through the interview that followed she was quiet, gentle, lifeless.
Mr. Mordaunt went away and told Mr. Jefferson Stewart that if she went into court that way they might as well throw in their hand.
“There’s a stiff case against her. We shall try and shake their witnesses of course, but in the long run the witness who matters most in a murder case is always the accused. And a young girl’s got a pull. She’s got her youth, she’s got her looks. If she makes a good impression she’ll get the benefit of the doubt—and we ought to be able to contrive a useful doubt or two. Then she can take advantage of it. But not if she goes into court like this. They’ll take one look at her and make sure she did it.”
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