Fair Warning

by Mignon Good Eberhart

  It was Gally who thought of Ancill and went to call him.

  “He’ll know,” he said: “he always knows,” and went into the hall. He did not return at once—did not return for at least ten minutes. They were talking again of lawyers for Rob, when Gally came back into the room and stood there looking at them with his eyes glittering with excitement.

  “He’s gone,” he said jerkily. “Cook says he left not more than fifteen minutes ago. He said he was going on an errand and that you were in a hurry for whatever it was. He took the light car. Did you send him on an errand, Marcia?”

  She hadn’t, of course. Later she realized that they ought then to have had some inkling of the truth.

  CHAPTER XVIII

  BUT THEY HADN’T. ALTHOUGH Jacob Wait was going over sheaves of reports again and finding one small, curious gap. It was a gap that he thought might account for Beatrice’s murder. But just then it seemed to him to add to the case against Rob, and he was mournfully exultant about it.

  And Rob in his cell with that barred door beside him was staring whitely at the bare floor and doing over and over again a simple bit of logic. It was an ugly bit of logic; the result of which forced him to face what he had not till then faced. It was inexorable; it opened an incredible vista. He had no proof: but did he want proof? And Marcia, he thought, was safe.

  Late that afternoon Dr. Blakie brought the lawyer to him. But still in the grip of that remorseless bit of logic he refused, white-faced, to talk and wanted only to ask questions. Was Marcia all right? She was not under arrest, then? What was going on? Oh, so Ancill had escaped!

  That put a new light on things, and he studied the lawyer frowningly and lost in thought. But still he didn’t want to talk, and the lawyer finally went away convinced in his heart that Rob had killed Ivan Godden and was refusing—as they did at first—to admit it to anyone. Even to the defense lawyer. He would return the next morning, he said. If Rob wanted him. Rob said absently that he did. But that Verity had better not come.

  He did rouse to ask a single question, and that was, if there was any chance of his being released now that Ancill had disappeared.

  “If he’s murdered, then I couldn’t have done it, because I was locked in here. If he’s run away, then it looks as if he’s the murderer.”

  Yes, the lawyer assured him, Ancill’s disappearance certainly ought to alter the situation. But he didn’t know what the police would do. And he regretted to admit that the case against Rob was—well—

  “Pretty tight,” said Rob.

  Yes, he was afraid it was. But they would do everything they could. However, Rob must give him complete confidence.

  He went away, wondering what young Mrs. Godden looked like.

  By night Ancill’s disappearance became a settled fact, for it was then that the police found the light car in which he’d made his escape. It was abandoned on a little-used road far north of Chicago on the edge of the forest. There was nothing in the car to give them any clue as to why—or where—he had gone. It was abandoned because it was out of gasoline and apparently he had been afraid to stop at a filling station. And wisely, for within twenty minutes of his flight’s being known it was broadcast from every police radio. Middle-aged man, slender, dark, wearing chauffeur’s cap, driving small car—make—number—color—wanted for murder. Wanted for murder. Calling all cars—wanted for murder—middle-aged man …

  The chauffeur’s cap was found in the car.

  There was no clue, either, to be found in his orderly room in the servants’ wing at the back of the house. Nor in any previous conversation he had had with Emma Beek or with a weeping, shattered Delia. Detectives were there again, questioning, searching, making up for the momentary relaxing of their guard. There was an unspoken admission that Ancill had been, really, a suspect. And that with Rob’s detention they had let down a little the stringency of that guard.

  Except for the two or three nearly concerned. Verity. Gally. Marcia.

  But they said nothing of this. Only questioned, and no one knew anything.

  Even Emma Beek was suddenly less communicative and came to Marcia in the middle of the afternoon and said, avoiding her eyes, that she wished to look for a new place once her month was out.

  “Why, certainly.”

  “You’ll not be needing me much longer, anyway,” said the woman craftily, and had gone before Marcia realized what she meant, and what that half-frightened, half-impudent look in her eyes meant. So that was it. The cook thought, and had thought from the first, that Marcia had killed Ivan. Marcia went to the door and called the woman back.

  “It’s true that I shall not need you any longer,” said Marcia. “You may leave as soon as the police permit you to go.” For a long moment they looked at each other; Marcia cold with anger and the memory of many meetings, Emma Beek instinctively a toady to superior strength and force. She said, blinking and unexpectedly, “I beg your pardon, I’m sure, ma’am. I told the police about—about your trouble with Mr. Godden because Miss Beatrice said to tell. I didn’t mean to get you into trouble. And if you was to keep me on I’m sure we’d get along perfect.” She was sly and smiling and ingratiating; a product of Beatrice’s and Ivan’s training.

  Marcia held back a small fury of disgust.

  “You were right to tell them anything they asked so long as it was the truth,” she said. “And I shan’t need you any longer.”

  Verity stayed there all that day, watching the detectives brought to the house by the search for Ancill, listening to that inquiry which was so fruitless; listening, too, for the telephone, sitting with an ashen blank face watching the rain. They said little, the two women, waiting and helpless in that chill, ghost-ridden house, where the rustle of Beatrice’s skirts still lingered on the stairway and the glasses along the bookshelves still held half-seen glimpses of Ivan’s handsome, pale face. Rain poured quietly and steadily all that day, as if the whole sky had become leaden and inexhaustible; foliage was growing lush and green, and the lawns were sodden and the hedges and evergreens drenched and bowed.

  Once Marcia, going over and over that worn circle of conjecture and weary, terrible questions, reached again the matter of the arsenic and the goldfish. Why had Ancill denied it? And why, she thought in futile exasperation, hadn’t she asked him about that denial, made him explain?

  She took a wrap and went down to the pool through the gray rain, her feet sinking into the sodden lawn, the rain cold on her face, her throat and her heart aching when she came to the summerhouse and remembered Rob coming to her there. The love and pain in his eyes. Holding her, a few moments later, in his arms with his mouth against her mouth. What had she brought him—and what was she to bring him! So terribly different from what she wanted to give him.

  And it would be worse.

  Collusion.

  She fought against the engulfing wave of horror that thought brought with it; fought it back, as she had done many times.

  But she wondered if ever again she could stand beside him. Would they let them seek each other’s eyes above a packed and arid courtroom? Or would his eyes at last turn away? Had she cost him too much?

  She moved and knelt beside the pool, pushing the wetness from her face and trying to see into the disturbed gray waters of the pool. The rain murmured upon it, and the water was opaque and rippling, and she could see no flashes of gold below that splashing surface. She returned to the house, a little afraid of the wet, deserted garden, remote and gloomy and too quiet except for the rhythm of the rain.

  Late in the afternoon the lawyer came, told them suavely that he had seen Rob, that he was well and in good spirits, that he was to see him in the morning, it would be better if they did not go to him just now—this with an oblique and rather surprised look at Marcia and a delicate cough—and went away, hurrying through the rain to his waiting car and getting his smart gray barcelona well spotted.

  They could make little of that, and it was too suave and too reassuring to be comforting.

/>   “But if Ancill’s gone voluntarily, it’s escape,” said Marcia. They had said it so many times it meant nothing, but she went on, “It’s flight. Well, then, there’s a reason for it. And if he murdered Ivan, then Rob didn’t. And they ought to release him.”

  But the hours went on, and he was not released.

  Yet that man hunt continued. And the papers that night had it.

  “Mystery Man Sought By Police. Sensational Developments In Double Murder.” Verity read the headlines in a tight, dry voice and skimmed the rest with swift, darkly haunted eyes.

  “Well, at any rate, they stick to Ancill and don’t mention Rob’s arrest. Thank God for that mercy. But it’s only temporary. When it breaks—” She stopped talking, as if she could literally say no more.

  Marcia was walking up and down—a slender figure in a blue sweater and skirt.

  “But there must be a reason for Ancill’s disappearance. He was frightened. I know he was frightened. If they can only find him!”

  Verity assented wearily. They had gone over it all so many times and so futilely. He had denied the goldfish episode. Why? He had suddenly become frightened when—so far as they knew—all the evidence tended to involve only Rob—why? There were no answers.

  Jacob Wait himself came about six o’clock. It was not a long interview; he was pressed for time, wasted no second, and looked sallow and ill and resentful.

  He listened, however, while Marcia told him of Ivan’s death and, this time, omitted nothing. He listened while Gally, summoned from the billiard table again and looking himself rather resentful, told of his own presence in the house at the time of the murder. Listened but—so far as Verity and Marcia, who waited in the library while Gally and Wait talked briefly in the drawing room, could make out—asked few questions.

  “If only he doesn’t tell about hearing Rob’s threat to kill Ivan!” thought Marcia anxiously. “If only he doesn’t tell too much!” She searched Gally’s face when he emerged, but could tell nothing from it; he vanished again with the hurried alacrity of a child let out of punishment, and Wait, still bored and curiously, deeply resentful of them all and showing it while Marcia—because of the puzzle of the arsenic it was so curious an inconsistency on Ancill’s part— told him of the goldfish and of Ancill’s denial of his tale.

  “And are the goldfish dead?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. I couldn’t see. I think so.”

  “Do you know anything of the arsenic?”

  “I think it was in the cupboard in the library. I think I saw it there. The night Ivan was murdered I—I came down to the library after you had gone.”

  “Never mind,” he interrupted briskly, “I know all that. Knew the next morning that you’d been looking for something in that cupboard. What were you after?”

  “How—”

  He was impatient.

  “Matches—pasteboard flaps with your fingerprints on ’em. Thought you were hunting for his will, when the affair of the will came up. Suppose now it was—this letter. Was it?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you didn’t find it? Why not?”

  “I—” Should she tell, after all, about Beatrice? No; that morning they had decided it was too dangerous to Rob; that they would wait his decision about it. “No. It was gone. But someone was in the library that night.”

  His eyes drooped a little lower as she told him of that.

  “Have you seen the flannel jacket since?”

  “No.”

  It was the only thing that seemed to interest him, and he was silent for a moment, jingling things in his pocket and looking at Marcia.

  He said suddenly, “I suppose you know that you are saying things that can be used against you?”

  It would sound silly and sententious and not really true if she said it was because somewhere in all that mass was the truth. She said nothing, and in that moment hated Jacob Wait as much as he hated her. But she also feared him.

  He did not seem to expect a reply.

  “Who put the arsenic in the cupboard and when?”

  She didn’t know.

  And she didn’t know, either, why Ancill had fled.

  “Had anything at all happened just before he left? What were you doing? Where were you? When did you first discover he was gone?”

  “We were in the library, talking of—of Rob’s arrest. Gally was telling of the night Beatrice was murdered and how he had come up to the butler’s pantry for cigarettes. Then he noticed the—oh, a glass paperweight Ivan was fond of had disappeared. And he kept talking of it, and finally we called Ancill to see if he knew anything of it. Ancill had gone by that time.”

  “A glass paperweight! Describe it.”

  She did so in detail.

  “How long has it been gone?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “A day—a week—two weeks?”

  Marcia searched her memory.

  “I can’t actually remember seeing it since the day Ivan was injured—a month ago,” she said finally. “But I’m not certain.”

  “The day the knife was hidden; the day the arsenic disappeared. Three weapons of death were in this room. Ivan Godden was injured so seriously he nearly died that day. A month later he is recovered, comes home, and is murdered—also in this room. Did you know there was a duplicate key to the french doors over there?”

  “No!”

  “There is. Ancill told me. He told me also that it’s been missing for some time. He didn’t know how long—perhaps—” said Jacob Wait slowly—“he thought perhaps a month. Who was here in this house the day your husband was injured in the auto accident?”

  “Ancill. Emma Beek and the housemaid. Beatrice, myself, Ivan. Dr. Blakie. And then they phoned that Ivan was injured, and we sent for Rob and Mrs. Copley to take us to the hospital.”

  “Galway Trench was not here?”

  “No.”

  “Were any of those people in this room? Alone?”

  “I don’t know.” He waited, and she added reluctantly, “They might have been.”

  “Could any of them have hidden the knife and the arsenic—perhaps, even, the paperweight—in that cupboard over there without being observed?”

  “I don’t know. Yes, I suppose so. It was all very confusing. We were putting on coats—hats—telephoning the hospital. Dr. Blakie went on ahead, and we followed.”

  He waited a moment, looking at her with dark, heavy-lidded eyes which seemed to focus, not on her, but on the events of that day over a month ago.

  “It’s a very odd thing,” he said thoughtfully, “how things always seem to return, somehow, to that day. It’s as if there were a hub there somewhere. As if something significant and important had happened that day. Let’s go over it again.”

  She thought fleetingly of the night of Ivan’s death when they had questioned her so long and when March eighteenth began to repeat itself so insistently in those questions.

  But there was nothing new to tell him; nothing she had not told him many times over.

  She pushed her hair back from her temples with a weary little gesture and began it again.

  The quarrel with Ivan about the little black dog, Bunty. The entrance of Ancill with that fatal package of things from the hardware store. Ivan’s picking up the dandelion knife, holding it in his beautiful fingers, commenting on its being slender and sharp like a dagger. The package left on the desk, Ivan’s saying not to worry about the dog being destroyed, that Ancill would see to it. His approaching her, saying he would kiss the tears away, and her own unexpected defiance. The three long red marks appearing on Ivan’s white cheek.

  She told it now unflinchingly, thinking only of Rob.

  “Then you took the dog to the Copleys’?”

  Yes. And Mrs. Copley said she would keep it. No, she hadn’t told them of her quarrel with Ivan; she’d told them of it only later, when his—Wait’s—questions brought it out. Yes, she supposed Ancill had heard that quarrel.

  “And when you returned
here, were the tools still on the desk?”

  Yes, she thought so.

  “What happened then?”

  Repetition again. Ivan had been injured. Mrs. Copley had sent for Dr. Blakie to look at the dog, hoping that with a clean bill of health from the doctor Ivan would permit her to keep it. He had looked at it and then had stopped to tell Marcia that the dog was all right. And while he was there they had got the message that Ivan was hurt. The doctor had gone at once to the hospital where they took Ivan; Beatrice had sent for Rob, asking him to take them into town, and his mother had come, too. They had all gone to the hospital. Dr. Blakie operated at once; they’d returned late that night. But she remembered nothing at all of the package on the desk. There had been, naturally, considerable confusion.

  “Were these people—Dr. Blakie, Mrs. Copley, Rob Copley—alone in the library during that time?”

  “That day, you mean? March eighteenth? I don’t know. I suppose any of them could have been; no one would have noticed. I couldn’t possibly say.”

  “Or if Galway Trench happened to have the duplicate key to the french doors, he could have been in the room without anyone knowing it?”

  “I suppose so,” said Marcia.

  “Delia couldn’t remember seeing the arsenic, or the knife that was used in the murder, when she put the package away the next morning,” said Jacob Wait. “Looks as if it had vanished the day of March eighteenth. Looks very much as if Rob Copley put it in that cupboard for future use in case Ivan Godden did not die. Yes, it looks as if that’s what happened.” His eyes were preoccupied, seeing something in the distance. “He knew Godden was seriously injured; he was to take you to the hospital. One big thought obsesses him—suddenly, without expecting it, Godden is in danger and may die; if he dies he’ll have Godden’s wife. But suppose he doesn’t die! In the face of that sudden glimpse of the future if he dies, Copley can’t face the possibility of his getting well. And while he’s waiting perhaps for you to be ready to go to the hospital, he sees three weapons of death on the desk before him. Three weapons of death.” The dreamy, imaginative look left the detective’s sallow face, and he said suddenly, snapping out the words, “He’s under great emotional stress—it’s the beginning of the thing that, actually, led up to that climax four weeks later when Ivan Godden returns cured. He says to himself: ‘If he doesn’t die now, he must die later.’ And here are three easy means of that death, every one of them traceable to the household. He realizes that, living so near you, it will be an easy matter to arrange to do it when you are out of the house. He thinks you are already gone the night of his mother’s dinner party, for he sees your wrap—which Beatrice unluckily has worn—and even the dinner party has been arranged to take you away from the house.”