‘May I ask what about?’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Dorothy; ‘I can’t tell you that. It would only give the old cat an opportunity to say I had been slandering her. So that’s it! What has she been telling you?’
‘Why, miss,’ said Superintendent Mason, taking out a pencil and scratching the side of his jaw with it, ‘I’m afraid she’s not exactly in a condition to tell us anything. She’s in a nursing-home at Guildford, rather badly smashed up round the head. Just between ourselves, it’s touch and go whether she’ll recover.’
First Dorothy could not feel her heart beating at all, and then it seemed to pound with enormous rhythm. The Superintendent was looking at her steadily. She forced herself to say:
‘You mean she’s had an accident?’
‘Not exactly, miss. The doctor says she was hit three or four times with that big glass paper-weight you may have seen on the table at her cottage. Eh?’
‘You don’t mean – you don’t mean somebody did it? Deliberately? But who did it?’
‘Well, miss,’ said Superintendent Mason, looking at her still harder until he became a huge Puritan face with a small mole beside his nose. ‘I’m bound to tell you that by everything we can see so far, it looks as though you did it.’
This wasn’t happening. It couldn’t be. She afterwards remembered, in a detached kind of way, studying all of them: the little lines round Harry’s eyes in the sunlight, the hastily brushed light hair, the loose leather wind-jacket whose zip fastener was half undone. She remembered thinking that despite his athletic prowess he looked ineffectual and a little foolish. But then her own father was not of much use now.
She heard her own voice.
‘But that’s absurd!’
‘I hope so, miss. I honestly hope so. Now tell me: were you out of this house last night?’
‘When?’
‘At any time.’
‘Yes. No. I don’t know. Yes, I think I was.’
‘For God’s sake, Dolly,’ said her father, ‘don’t say anything more until we’ve got a lawyer here. I’ve telephoned to town; I didn’t want to alarm you; I didn’t even wake you: there’s some explanation of this. There must be!’
It was not her own emotion; it was the wretchedness of his face which held her. Bulky, semi-bald, worried about business, worried about everything else in this world, that was John Brant. His crippled left arm and black glove were pressed against his side. He stood in the bright pool of sunlight, a face of misery.
‘I’ve – seen her,’ he explained. ‘It wasn’t pretty, that wasn’t. Not that I haven’t seen worse. In the war.’ He touched his arm. ‘But you’re a little girl, Dolly; you’re only a little girl. You couldn’t have done that.’
His plaintive tone asked for confirmation.
‘Just one moment, sir,’ interposed Superintendent Mason.
‘Now, miss! You tell me you were outside the house last night?’
‘Yes.’
‘In the snow?’
‘Yes, yes, yes!’
‘Do you remember the time?’
‘No, I don’t think so.’
‘Tell me, miss: what size shoes do you wear?’
‘Four.’
‘That’s a rather small size, isn’t it?’ When she nodded dumbly, Superintendent Mason shut up his notebook. ‘Now, if you’ll just come with me?’
The cottage had a side door. Without putting his fingers on the knob, Mason twisted the spindle round and opened it. The overhang of the eaves had kept clear the two steps leading down; but beyond a thin coating of snow lay like a plaster over the world between here and the shuttered cottage across the way.
There were two strings of footprints in that snow. Dorothy knew whose they were. Hardened and sharp printed, one set of prints moved out snakily from the steps, passed under the arch of the powdered laurel hedge, and stopped at the steps to the side door of Mrs Topham’s house. Another set of the same tracks – a little blurred, spaced at longer intervals where the person had evidently been running desperately – came back from the cottage to these steps.
That mute sign of panic stirred Dorothy’s memory. It wasn’t a dream. She had done it. Subconsciously she had known it all the time. She could remember other things: the fur coat clasped round her pyjamas, the sting of the snow to wet slippers, the blind rush in the dark.
‘Yours, miss?’ inquired Superintendent Mason.
‘Yes. Oh, yes, they’re mine.’
‘Easy, miss,’ muttered the Superintendent. ‘You’re looking a bit white round the gills. Come in here and sit down; I won’t hurt you.’ Then his own tone grew petulant. Or perhaps something in the heavy simplicity of the girl’s manner penetrated his official bearing. ‘But why did you do it, miss? Lord, why did you do it? That’s to say, breaking open that desk of hers to get a handful of trinkets not worth ten quid for the lot? And then not even taking the trouble to mess up your footprints afterwards!’ He coughed, checking himself abruptly.
John Brant’s voice was acid. ‘Good, my friend. Very good. The first sign of intelligence so far. I presume you don’t suggest my daughter is insane?’
‘No, sir. But they were her mother’s trinkets, I hear.’
‘Where did you hear that? You, I suppose, Harry?’ Harry Ventnor pulled up the zip fastener of his wind-jacket as though girding himself. He seemed to suggest that he was the good fellow whom everybody was persecuting; that he wanted to be friends with the world, if they would only let him. Yet such sincerity blazed in his small features that it was difficult to doubt his good intentions.
‘Now look here, Dad, old boy. I had to tell them, didn’t I? It’s no good trying to hide things like that. I know that, just from reading those stories –’
‘Stories!’
‘All right: say what you like. They always find out, and then they make it worse than it really was.’ He let this sink in. ‘I tell you, you’re going about it in the wrong way. Suppose Dolly did have a row with the Topham about that jewellery? Suppose she did go over there last night? Suppose those are her footprints? Does that prove she bashed the Topham? Not that a public service wasn’t done; but why couldn’t it have been a burglar just as well?’
Superintendent Mason shook his head.
‘Because it couldn’t, sir.’
‘But why? I’m asking you, why?’
‘There’s no harm in telling you that, sir, if you’ll just listen. You probably remember that it began to snow last night at a little past eleven o’clock.’
‘No, I don’t. We were all in bed by then.’
‘Well, you can take my word for it,’ Mason told him patiently. ‘I was up half the night at the police station; and it did. It stopped snowing about midnight. You’ll have to take my word for that too, but we can easily prove it. You see, sir, Mrs Topham was alive and in very good health at well after midnight. I know that too, because she rang up the police station and said she was awake and nervous and thought there were burglars in the neighbourhood. Since the lady does that same thing,’ he explained with a certain grimness, ‘on the average of about three times a month, I don’t stress that. What I am telling you is that her call came in at 12.10, at least ten minutes after the snow had stopped.’
Harry hesitated, and the Superintendent went on with the same patient air:
‘Don’t you see it, sir? Mrs Topham wasn’t attacked until after the snow stopped. Round her cottage now there’s twenty yards of clean, clear, unmarked snow in every direction. The only marks in that snow, the only marks of any kind at all, are the footprints Miss Brant admits she made herself.’
Then he rose at them in exasperation.
‘’Tisn’t as though anybody else could have made the tracks. Even if Miss Brant didn’t admit it herself, I’m absolutely certain nobody else did. You, Mr Ventnor, wear size ten shoes. Mr Brant wears size nine. Walk in size four tracks? Ayagh! And yet somebody did get into that cottage with a key, bashed the old lady pretty murderously, robbed her desk, and got away aga
in. If there are no other tracks or marks of any kind in the snow, who did it? Who must have done it?’
Dorothy could consider it, now, in almost a detached way. She remembered the paper-weight with which Mrs Topham had been struck. It lay on the table in Mrs Topham’s stuffy parlour, a heavy glass globe with a tiny landscape inside. When you shook the glass globe, a miniature snowstorm rose within – which seemed to make the attack more horrible.
She wondered if she had left any fingerprints on it. But over everything rose Renée Topham’s face, Renée Topham, her mother’s bosom friend.
‘I hated her,’ said Dorothy; and, unexpectedly, she began to cry.
Dennis Jameson, of the law firm of Morris, Farnsworth & Jameson, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, shut up his briefcase with a snap. He was putting on his hat and coat when Billy Farnsworth looked into the office.
‘Hullo!’ said Farnsworth. ‘You off to Surrey over that Brant business?’
‘Yes.’
‘H’m. Believe in miracles, do you?’
‘No.’
‘That girl’s guilty, my lad. You ought to know that.’
‘It’s our business,’ said Jameson, ‘to do what we can for our clients.’
Farnsworth looked at him shrewdly. ‘I see it in your ruddy cheek. Quixotry is alive again. Young idealist storms to relief of good-looker in distress, swearing to –’
‘I’ve met her twice,’ said Jameson. ‘I like her, yes. But, merely using a small amount of intelligence on this, I can’t see that they’ve got such a thundering good case against her.’
‘Oh, my lad!’
‘Well, look at it. What do they say the girl did? This Mrs Topham was struck several times with a glass paperweight. There are no fingerprints on the paper-weight, which shows signs of having been wiped. But, after having the forethought to wipe her fingerprints carefully off the paper-weight, Dorothy Brant then walks back to her cottage and leaves behind two sets of footprints which could be seen by aerial observation a mile up. Is that reasonable?’
Farnsworth looked thoughtful.
‘Maybe they would say she isn’t reasonable,’ he pointed out. ‘Never mind the psychology. What you’ve got to get round are the physical facts. Here is the mysterious widow Topham entirely alone in the house; the only servant comes in by day. Here are one person’s footprints. Only that girl could have made the tracks: and, in fact, admits she did. It’s a physical impossibility for anybody else to have entered or left the house. How do you propose to get round that?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Jameson rather hopelessly. ‘But I want to hear her side of it first. The only thing nobody seems to have heard, or even to be curious about, is what she thinks herself.’
Yet, when he met her at the cottage late that afternoon, she cut the ground from under his feet.
Twilight was coming down when he turned in at the gate, a bluish twilight in which the snow looked grey. Jameson stopped a moment at the gate, and stared across at the thin laurel hedge dividing this property from Mrs Topham’s. There was nothing remarkable about this hedge, which was some six feet high and cut through by a gateway like a Gothic arch. But in front of the arch, peering up at the snow-coated side of the hedge just above it, stood a large figure in cap and waterproof. Somehow he looked familiar. At his elbow another man, evidently the local Superintendent of Police, was holding up a camera; and a flash-bulb glared against the sky. Though he was too far away to hear anything, Jameson had a queer impression that the large man was laughing uproariously.
Harry Ventnor, whom he knew slightly, met Jameson at the door.
‘She’s in there,’ Harry explained, nodding towards the front room. ‘Er – don’t upset her, will you? Here, what the devil are they doing with that hedge?’
He stared across the lawn.
‘Upset her?’ said Jameson with some asperity. ‘I’m here, if possible, to help her. Won’t you or Mr Brant give some assistance? Do you honestly think that Miss Brant in her rational senses could have done what they say she did?’
‘In her rational senses?’ repeated Harry. After looking at Jameson in a curious way, he said no more; he turned abruptly and hurried off across the lawn.
Yet Dorothy, when Jameson met her, gave no impression of being out of her rational senses. It was her straightforwardness he had always liked, the straightforwardness which warmed him now. They sat in the homely, firelit room, by the fireplace over which were the silver cups to denote Harry’s athletic and gymnastic prowess, and the trophies of John Brant’s earlier days at St Moritz. Dorothy herself was an outdoor girl.
‘To advise me?’ she said. ‘You mean, to advise me what to say when they arrest me?’
‘Well, they haven’t arrested you yet, Miss Brant.’
She smiled at him. ‘And yet I’ll bet that surprises you, doesn’t it? Oh, I know how deeply I’m in! I suppose they’re only poking about to get more evidence. And then there’s a new man here, a man named March, from Scotland Yard. I feel almost flattered.’
Jameson sat up. He knew now why that immense figure by the hedge had seemed familiar.
‘Not Colonel March?’
‘Yes. Rather a nice person, really,’ answered Dorothy, shading her eyes with her hand. Under her light tone he felt that her nerves were raw. ‘Then again, they’ve been all through my room. And they can’t find the watch and the brooch and the rings I’m supposed to have stolen from Aunt Renée Topham. Aunt Renée!’
‘So I’ve heard. But that’s the point: what are they getting at? A watch and a brooch and a couple of rings! Why should you steal that from anybody, let alone her?’
‘Because they weren’t hers,’ said Dorothy, suddenly looking up with a white face, and speaking very fast. ‘They belonged to my mother.’
‘Steady.’
‘My mother is dead,’ said Dorothy. ‘I suppose it wasn’t just the watch and the rings, really. That was the excuse, the breaking-point, the thing that brought it on. My mother was a great friend of Mrs Topham. It was “Aunt Renée” this and “Aunt Renée” that, while my mother was alive to pamper her. But my mother wanted me to have those trinkets, such as they were. And Aunt Renée Topham coolly appropriated them, as she appropriates everything else she can. I never knew what had happened to them until yesterday.
‘Do you know that kind of woman? Mrs Topham is really charming, aristocratic and charming, with the cool charm that takes all it can get and expects to go on getting it. I know for a fact that she’s really got a lot of money, though what she does with it I can’t imagine: and the real reason why she buries herself in the country is that she’s too mean to risk spending it in town. I never could endure her. Then, when my mother died and I didn’t go on pampering Aunt Renée as she thought I should, it was a very difficult thing. How that woman loves to talk about us! Harry’s debts, and my father’s shaky business. And me.’
She checked herself again, smiling at him. ‘I’m sorry to inflict all this on you.’
‘You’re not inflicting anything on me.’
‘But it’s rather ridiculous, isn’t it?’
‘Ridiculous,’ said Jameson grimly, ‘is not the word I should apply to it. So you had a row with her?’
‘Oh, a glorious row. A beautiful row. The grandmother of all rows.’
‘When?’
‘Yesterday. When I saw her wearing my mother’s watch.’
She looked at the fire, over which the silver cups glimmered.
‘Maybe I said more than I should have,’ she went on. ‘But I got no support from my father or Harry. I don’t blame Dad: he’s so worried about business, and that bad arm of his troubles him so much sometimes, that all he wants is peace and quiet. As for Harry, he doesn’t really like her; but she took rather a fancy to him, and that flatters him. He’s a kind of male counterpart of Aunt Renée. Out of a job? – well, depend on somebody else. And I’m in the middle of all this. It’s “Dolly, do this,” and “Dolly, do that,” and “Good old Dolly; she won’t mind.” But I do
mind. When I saw that woman standing there wearing my mother’s watch, and saying commiserating things about the fact that we couldn’t afford a servant, I felt that something ought to be done about it. So I suppose I must have done something about it.’
Jameson reached out and took her hands. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Did you do it?’
‘I don’t know! That’s just the trouble.’
‘But surely –’
‘No. That was one of the things Mrs Topham always had such sport with. You don’t know much about anything when you walk in your sleep.’
‘Ridiculous, isn’t it?’ she went on, after another pause. ‘Utterly ludicrous. But not to me! Not a bit. Ever since I was a child, when I’ve been over-tired or nervously exhausted, it’s happened. Once I came downstairs and built and lit a fire in the dining-room, and set the table for a meal. I admit it doesn’t happen often, and never before with results like this.’ She tried to laugh. ‘But why do you think my father and Harry looked at me like that? That’s the worst of it. I really don’t know whether I’m a near-murderer or not.’
This was bad.
Jameson admitted that to himself, even as his reason argued against it. He got up to prowl round the room, and her brown eyes never left him. He could not look away; he saw the tensity of her face in every corner.
‘Look here,’ he said quietly, ‘this is nonsense.’
‘Oh, please. Don’t you say that. It’s not very original.’
‘But do you seriously think you went for that woman and still don’t know anything about it now?’
‘Would it be more difficult than building a fire?’
‘I didn’t ask you that. Do you think you did it?’
‘No,’ said Dorothy.
That question did it. She trusted him now. There was understanding and sympathy between them, a mental force and communication that could be felt as palpably as the body gives out heat.
‘Deep down inside me, no, I don’t believe it. I think I should have waked up. And there was no – well, no blood on me, you know. But how are you going to get round the evidence?’
(The evidence. Always the evidence.)
Murder On Christmas Eve Page 6