Outrageous Fortune

by Patricia Wentworth

  “You didn’t!” said Caroline. She pressed against him and laid her cheek to his. “Jim—darling—don’t go all away by yourself. Talk to me. We’ll find a way out.”

  He put her arms away from him.

  “Suppose there’s no way out. Suppose I did it.”

  Caroline sat back a little. She put her hands in her lap and lifted her face to the sky. She had a clear, untroubled look that was very comforting. She spoke softly and steadily, as if she were reasoning with a child.

  “Why should you have shot him, darling?”

  “I don’t know—I was there—I remember drinking with him—”

  “You wouldn’t have shot him without a reason. You don’t just go about shooting people for nothing—nobody does.”

  “The emeralds are not exactly nothing.”

  “That’s rubbish!” The words were touched with a light scorn.

  “Is it?”

  “Yes, it is—you know it is, really, Jim. Do you remember anything at all about the Nesta woman?”

  “No.”

  “Well, wouldn’t you have, if you had married her?”

  “I don’t know.” His voice sounded hopeless.

  “She didn’t touch a chord? I mean, sometimes you meet a total stranger and you don’t know where they come from or who they are, but something goes click inside you and you feel as if you knew them. You didn’t feel anything like that?”

  He laughed grimly.

  “I loathed her,” he said.

  “So did I,” said Caroline happily. “Well, there you are—if you loathed her, you wouldn’t have married her.”

  There was rather a horrid pause. Then he said,

  “Perhaps I loathed her because I married her.”

  Caroline cried out quickly.

  “Oh, you didn’t!”

  The silence fell again. She had to break it herself.

  “Jim, listen—I’ve got an idea. You can look up your signature in that registry office. No, it’s not your signature—it can’t be! It’s Jim Riddell’s signature. You can look it up, and then you’ll know that it isn’t yours.”

  “Or that it is.”

  “It isn’t! You can take the first train to-morrow—”

  “That’s just what I can’t do.”

  “Why can’t you?”

  “Because I gather that the police are looking for me.”

  “You?”

  “Jim Riddell—or Jim Randal—I don’t know which. I saw a poster as I left Ledlington. ‘Van Berg Case—Important Clue—Man Wanted by Police.’”

  “Why should it be you?” said Caroline.

  “My dear, I was there—we’ve got to face that. I was there, and I saw the emeralds. I don’t think I’m in a position to walk into that registry office and ask to see the entry of Jim Riddell’s marriage.”

  “I could,” said Caroline quickly.

  “You mustn’t get mixed up in it.”

  “There won’t be anything to mix me—the registrar won’t know me from Adam.”

  He put his head in his hands for a minute, trying to get through the dull fatigue which clogged his thoughts.

  “I don’t want you to have anything to do with it. I’m too tired to think properly—but you’re not to get mixed up with this—you oughtn’t to be here.”

  She put her arms around him again.

  “You’ll come home with me—I’ll make you a lovely bed on the sofa.”

  “No—I can’t.”

  “Because of us, or because of you?”

  “Both. I’ll get in here somehow. I shall be all right.”

  Caroline laughed.

  “The back door key is under a loose stone in the yard—Mrs Ledger always puts it there. She comes up once a week to light fires and air the house. Robert said she’d better when he heard you were coming home. She says the key is too ‘dratted heavy to traipse up and down with.’ This was one of her days, so the kitchen will be nice and warm.”

  Jim felt a curious thrill of anticipation as they skirted the house and came into the dark yard behind it. There was no moonlight here. The shadow of the house lay across it like a fold of black cloth.

  Caroline caught his hand and drew him lightly on.

  Presently she was feeling with her foot. A stone tilted. She stooped, and came up with the key. She put it in his hand, cold and heavy, and he opened the door.

  Whatever else he had forgotten, he had not forgotten the ways of the house in which he had grown up. He took Caroline by the arm and walked along the pitchdark passage to the kitchen without so much as a false step.

  Caroline found matches and lit a candle end. Mrs Ledger had stuck it into one of the old brass candlesticks. The yellow light showed the brass turned bronze with streaks of verdigris. The kitchen was warm and pleasant. There was ash still hot in the range, and a line full of blankets had been wound up on a pulley and hung just clear of their heads.

  “They look like ghosts,” said Caroline under her breath—“sheeted ghosts. I don’t think I like them very much.”

  But Jim was pulling them down.

  “They’ll make a good bed,” he said.

  Caroline gave a faint shriek.

  “I saw two cockroaches! You can’t sleep here!”

  “I’ll go into the study.”

  “There’s nothing for you to eat. I’ll run home and get you something.”

  “I bought things in Ledlington. I’ve got plenty left.”

  “Oh—” said Caroline. She stood a minute; then she said, speaking rather fast, “Could you get along till tomorrow evening?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “Because I don’t think I’d better come up in the daytime—someone might see me. People have most awfully sharp eyes when you don’t want them to. Will you be all right till then?”

  “Of course I shall.”

  “All right, then I’d better go.” She came up to him and leaned towards him across the blankets. “Jim—you’ll be here? You won’t go away—will you? Swear?”

  “All right.”

  “You won’t go without seeing me? You won’t just vanish? Because I couldn’t bear it. You won’t?”

  He shook his head.

  Caroline flung her arms around his neck, held him for a moment in a tingling clasp, and ran out of the kitchen and along the black passage. Her footsteps rang on the stone, and the door shut.

  XV

  Caroline caught the seven-thirty to London. All the time she and Jim were getting into Hale Place, whilst he was pulling down the blankets and she was saying someone might see her if she came back by day, she was concocting a secret plan. In the end she ran away because she was afraid that he would guess what she meant to do. She thought he would have guessed if he hadn’t been stupid with fatigue. She thought he was like a man half drugged. His mind moved slowly; he had to push it to make it move at all. That was why he hadn’t guessed; and it was lucky for her, because if he had guessed, he would have tried to stop her, and she meant to go.

  It was past two o’clock when she came back to the cottage. The gate was unlatched and the door stood wide open as she had left it. If Pansy Ann had only known! To Pansy there was always a burglar round the next corner.

  Caroline undressed and lay down under her great-grandmother’s embroidered quilt, but she did not sleep. She was too flooded with joy to sleep. Her hands still kept the touch of Jim’s hands; her ears still rang with all the sounds of his voice. She had no time to fall asleep.

  At six she dressed, went tiptoe down the stairs, made tea, and boiled herself an egg. Then she wrote on the slate, “Gone to town,” and propped it up against the bowl of fruit in the middle of the gate-leg table; after which she set out to walk four miles across the fields to Hinton, where she caught the train.

  She had the carriage to herself as far as Ledlington, where it filled up. She wondered what she would do if Nesta Riddell were to get in. How dare she say Jim was her husband? It was the most unbelievable, impudent thing. Caroline tripped up over
her own words. Unbelievable meant not to be believed. But you couldn’t believe that a woman would claim a man for her husband when he wasn’t her husband. If you just couldn’t believe it..… What had Nesta Riddell done? She had gone to the hospital and taken Jim away. She had said he was her husband. This wasn’t unbelievable, because she had done it. The unbelievable thing was that she should claim a stranger. But she had claimed a stranger. Had she? If it was unbelievable, then Caroline didn’t believe it. Then he wasn’t a stranger. Where did this take her. She had a terrified sense of having betrayed herself and Jim.

  She pushed the word that had tripped her right out of her mind and shut the door on it. She hadn’t got to account for what Nesta Riddell had done. She had only to go to the Grove Road registry office and see James Riddell’s name in a stranger’s writing. That would prove that Nesta was lying, and that Jim was free. It was the easiest thing in the world, and she felt that she couldn’t bear to see Jim again until she had the proof that it was not he who had signed the register as Nesta Riddell’s husband.

  The train jogged along. It stopped at every station, but after Ledlington the carriage was too full to take in any more passengers. There was an old woman with a string bag full of vegetables and an enormous sheaf of cottage flowers—crimson phlox, red and yellow single dahlias, full-blown cabbage roses, and clove carnations which scented the whole compartment. She had a crushed black straw hat on the back of her head, a black Cashmere dress, and a thick black cloth coat. Her face was broad and red under scanty wisps of grey hair. She was very hot, because she lived two miles out of Ledlington and had hurried to catch the train. She fanned herself with a cabbage leaf, and as soon as she had got her breath she began to talk, first about the weather, and then about the Van Berg case. Three girls on the opposite seat, flimsily dressed slips of things with salmon-coloured stockings, berets, and magenta lips went on whispering and giggling together whilst she told them how the snails were over-running her garden from one end to the other, and how she had set a slug trap—” And if I was to tell you what I caught, you wouldn’t believe me.”

  A shy young man who was fidgeting with an unlighted cigarette looked out of the window. The Miss Borings, who kept a genteel wool-shop in Mickleham Street, sat primly side by side in their neat, dowdy blue serge coats and skirts. They were identical tucked muslin blouses with high collars and rolled gold collar-supporters, and twin hats of dark blue straw with plain black ribbons. The schoolboy next to them was immersed in the last Edgar Wallace. The old gentleman with the beard went on filling his pipe. And the young married couple opposite Caroline continued to hold one another’s hands.

  Snails have no charm to unite a carriage full of strangers in a common bond of interest. But no sooner had the stout woman pronounced the name Van Berg than everyone had something to say.

  “It’s a queer thing they don’t seem to catch the man that shot Mr Van Berg,” she said, and the schoolboy emerged from his thriller with a jerk.

  “They say they’ve got a clue,” he began.

  “That doesn’t mean very much,” said the old man. He tapped his pipe. “The sort of thing they say to keep the public quiet—like throwing a bone to a dog.”

  The girl with the large blue eyes rolled them at the shy young man and giggled.

  The stout woman fanned herself.

  “I was up at the Hall yesterday—”

  “Packham Hall?” said both Miss Borings together.

  The stout woman nodded.

  “Cook’s my brother’s second wife’s cousin-in-law, and I took her over a couple of pots of honey. The shop stuff’s that watered down she don’t relish it, so I took her some of mine—never been before where they didn’t keep their own bees, and don’t like it. And then to have a murder, or next door to it, well, she don’t think she’ll stay—such an upset, and not what she’s used to. Why, when she heard the shot, she come over that queer she couldn’t have got out of bed, not if it had been the house of fire. ‘Mrs Rodgers,’ she says—that being my name—‘Mrs Rodgers, I give you my solemn identical word, I just pulled the clothes over my head and waited to see if I was going to be murdered in my bed.’ She don’t look her right colour yet.”

  “I don’t know how I should feel if I was to hear someone being shot in the middle of the night,” said the young married woman.

  “I know what you’d do,” said her husband—“pinch me, same as you’re doing now.”

  The girl giggled, and the Miss Borings coughed.

  “Ah!” said Mrs Rodgers. “It isn’t everyone that’s got someone to pinch. I’m a widow meself, and so’s Mrs Henry that I’ve been telling you about. Her ’usband was a p’liceman, so it doesn’t put her about having the police in and out and all over the place, as you might say—and maybe she’s got told a thing or two as she wouldn’t have got told if it weren’t for her ’usband’s official position.”

  Everyone leaned forward a little. The shy young man burst into speech.

  “Did she tell you who they suspected?”

  Mrs Rodgers shook her head.

  “Were there any finger-prints?” said the schoolboy. “They’ll get him if there were.”

  “Ah!” said Mrs Rodgers darkly. “Well, I don’t know as I ought to say, but seeing as we’re all friends here—” She paused, fanning herself.

  Caroline caught the inside of her lips between her teeth. Her hands held each other hard. A general murmur encouraged Mrs Rodgers to proceed.

  “Well, it’s something as hasn’t got into the papers—I can tell you that—and everyone in the house told not to say a word. They’d have kep’ them from knowing if so be they could, but when there’s a tray and glasses took for fingerprints, there’s going to be talk in the servants’ hall whether or no.”

  “Ah—” said the old man with the beard.

  Caroline’s grip relaxed a little. She knew this already; it was what Jim had told her. But then it meant—it meant he had remembered right.

  Mrs Rodgers sunk her voice to a sepulchral whisper.

  “There was a tray with whisky and soda and two glasses in Mr Van Berg’s study, and the police took ’em for finger-prints. And Mrs Henry says to me, “That wasn’t no plain straightforward burglar,’ she says. ‘If a burglar comes in on a gentleman in the middle of the night, they don’t sit down and have drinks together—not much they don’t,’ she says.”

  “Were the glasses full or empty?” said the shy young man.

  “Empty down to the last drop,” said the Mrs Rodgers. “And what’s more—but there, p’raps I didn’t ought to repeat that.”

  “I’m sure none of us will let it go any further,” said the elder Miss Boring.

  “Well, I don’t know as I’d better, seeing as Mrs Henry wouldn’t ha’ told me if it hadn’t been for me overhearing what passed between her and Mrs Van Berg’s maid.”

  Caroline’s heart began to beat hard and fast. What was she going to hear? She felt as if at any moment this fat good-natured woman might say something that couldn’t ever be unsaid again—something dangerous, something that might hurt Jim. It was just as if she could see the shadow of something dreadful coming round the corner.

  Everyone was begging Mrs Rodgers to go on.

  “Well, I don’t know as I ought. That’s the worst of talking—you run on, and then you can’t take it back again. A sister’s niece of mine lost her young man that way—said something she was sorry for next moment, and off he went and married the barmaid at The Lion. And a nice life she led him—more temper in her little finger than poor Lizzie’d got in her whole body. Lor bless me if we haven’t got to Meade already!—and perhaps just as well, or I might have said more than I ought. Now, I wonder if anyone ’ud be good enough to hand my basket out after me. It’s a deal easier to get out backwards when you come to me size.”

  The train jerked and clanked to a standstill. The shy young man opened the door. Mrs Rodgers backed out, took her basket, and bade the carriage at large an affable farewell.
<
br />   Without having thought of it beforehand, Caroline found herself saying, “Please may I pass?” She had to say that because the schoolboy was standing right in the doorway. He moved as the guard came along to shut the door.

  Caroline said in a soft breathless voice, “I’m getting out,” and jumped down on to the platform just as the train began to move. She didn’t wait for the guard to scold her.

  Mrs Rodgers was already giving her ticket. Caroline ran after her and caught her up just outside the station where Meade Hill runs steeply up between hedges full of bramble and elder.

  Mrs Rodgers stared at her in astonishment, and Caroline realized that she had no idea what she was going to say. How could she when she hadn’t even known that she was going to get out of the train? One minute she had just been sitting there, and the next minute she was saying, “Please, may I pass?” and jumping down from the moving train. It must have come over her suddenly that she simply couldn’t let Mrs Rodgers go, and now that she had caught her up she didn’t know what to say. She said the first thing that came into her head.

  “Can I help you with your basket?”

  Mrs Rodgers looked her up and down.

  “What’s a young lady like you want to carry my basket for?”

  “I’m going your way.”

  “And how do you know what way I’m going, miss?”

  Caroline looked rather as if she had been caught stealing jam. Her lips trembled into a smile.

  “I r-ran after you,” she said.

  Mrs Rodgers set down her basket in the road and nodded.

  “Honesty’s the best policy. What brought you after me? For by the look of you you hadn’t any thoughts of getting out here.”

  “No,” said Caroline. “I should truly like to carry your basket.” She picked it up, and they began to mount the hill.

  “And that’s what you came after me for, I’ll be bound!”

  “No—I came after you because I wanted to talk to you.”

  “That’s straight anyway. And what have you got to say?”

  “I didn’t want to say anything. I wanted you to tell me what Mrs Henry told you.”