She had a plan now, a plan of sorts. It was a gamble, but then what could she do that was not? Picking up the directory, she looked up the Sowerbys’ number and dialled it.
To her satisfaction, it was a woman’s voice that answered. Frances did not introduce herself.
“I’ve found what you were looking for,” she said softly.
There was a silence. Frances suddenly became aware of how her heart was thudding. For this was the moment when she would discover whether or not her gamble had paid off. She might have guessed totally wrongly.
Mrs. Sowerby might be an innocent woman who had been in bed all day with ’flu, feeling very ill, and if that were so, Frances would have to start thinking all over again. It seemed to her lunacy now that she had not called the police as soon as she had found Julia’s body. If only she had known how simple it was going to be to find the photographs, she would have done so, and would have had plenty of time to destroy them before the police arrived. But there was not much point in thinking on those lines now. It was too late. She waited.
At last an almost whispering voice said in her ear, “Who are you?”
She drew a shuddering breath. So she had been right. Her plan was working.
“A friend of Julia’s,” she said. “I think you’d better come here as soon as possible.”
“What do you want?” the voice asked.
“Your help,” Frances said.
“I can’t come. I’m ill.”
“I think it would be advisable to make a quick recovery.”
“But I can’t. My husband wouldn’t hear of my going out.”
“That’s your problem. I’ll wait here for a little, but not for long.”
There was another silence, then the voice said, “All right, I’ll see what I can do.”
The telephone at the other end was put down. Frances put down the one that she was holding, realizing that the hand that had been gripping it was clammy with sweat and had left damp marks on the instrument. She wondered if that mattered, but decided that it did not. She would have another call to make presently, which would account for the fingerprints.
She waited an hour before there came a ring at the front door bell. The early dusk of the February afternoon was already dimming the daylight. She had spent some of the time while she had had to wait stripping Julia’s body of the dressing-gown and night-dress that she was wearing and redressing it in pants and bra, jeans and sweater. It had been a terrible undertaking. In the middle of it she had felt faint and had had to go back to the sitting-room to give herself a chance to recover her self-control. But she had been afraid to wait until the other woman arrived and could help her in case the body stiffened too much to make the undressing of it possible. She knew nothing about how long it took for rigor mortis to set in. The blood-stained clothes that she removed were a problem and so was the hammer. She had not thought about that until after she had started undressing Julia, but in the end she made a bundle of them, took them out to the garage and put them into the boot of the Darnells’ car. Then she went back into the house to wait.
When the ring at the door came at last and she went to answer it, she found the woman whom she had been expecting on the doorstep. Her guess about the photographs had been correct. Isobel Sowerby was a middle-aged woman, tall and thick-set, with thick dark hair to her shoulders, intense dark eyes and jutting lips. She was wearing slacks and a sheepskin jacket.
Staring at Frances with deep enmity, she said, “What am I supposed to do now?”
“We’re going to arrange a suicide,” Frances answered.
“I don’t understand,” the other woman said. “If you know so much, why haven’t you turned me in?”
“Because I’m involved myself. I made the mistake of not calling the police as soon as I found the body. I wanted to find some photographs of me that Oliver had and I didn’t think until it was too late how difficult it was going to be to explain how I’d managed not to find Julia as soon as I got back from the church. So I’m in almost as much trouble as you are. And I think the best thing for both of us to do is to put Julia into her car and send her over the cliffs into the sea. Suicide while the balance of her mind was disturbed by the death of her husband. I couldn’t arrange it alone because she’s too heavy for me to carry. I had to have help.”
“All right, whatever you say,” Isobel Sowerby said. “But give me the photographs first.”
“Afterwards,” Frances said.
“No, now, or I won’t help you.”
“Afterwards,” Frances repeated.
They looked at one another with wary antagonism, then Isobel Sowerby shrugged her shoulders.
“Let’s get on with it then,” she said. “I persuaded my husband to go to the golf club to get over the funeral, and he’ll stay there for a time and have a few drinks, but he’ll be home presently and it won’t help us to have him asking me questions.”
“How did you get into the house this morning?” Frances asked. “I’ve been wondering about that.”
“The back door was unlocked, as I knew it would be. We aren’t particular about locking up round here.”
“And you left in a hurry when you heard me come in.”
“Yes. Now let’s get on.”
It was almost dark by then and the garage doors could not be seen from the lane outside. There was no one to see them as they carried Julia’s body from the house to the car, put it in the seat beside the driver’s, covered it with a rug, got into the car themselves and with Isobel Sowerby driving, since she knew the roads, started towards the coast. She drove cautiously along the twisting lanes until at last they reached the cliff-top and saw the dark chasm of the sea ahead of them.
Stopping the car close to the edge of the cliff, she and Frances got out and between them moved Julia’s body into the driving seat. After that it was only a case of turning on the engine again, putting the car into low gear, slamming the doors and standing back while it went slowly forward to the brink, seemed to teeter there for an instant, then went plunging down, the sound of the crash that it made as it hit the rocks below carrying up to them with a loudness which it seemed to Frances must carry for miles.
But afterwards there was no sign that anyone else had heard it. The darkness around them was silent. They started the long walk back.
They did not talk to one another as they walked and had reached the Darnells’ cottage before Isobel Sowerby said, “I don’t know what I’m going to say to my husband. He’ll have got back from the golf club long ago.”
“You’ll think of something,” Frances said. She did not think that Major Sowerby would be difficult to delude. “You could always say you’ve been wandering around in a state of delirium.”
“Which is what I think I’ve been doing,” Isobel Sowerby said. “Now give me the photographs.”
Frances took her into the sitting-room and showed her the heap of ashes in the gate.
“I burnt them.”
Isobel Sowerby stared at them incredulously, then broke suddenly into hysterical laughter.
“What a fool I am!” she cried. “I’ve always been a fool. I needn’t have come at all!”
“But I needed your help, so naturally I wasn’t going to tell you that,” Frances replied.
“Are those really my photographs? You really destroyed them?”
“Along with some of my own. I’d get home now as soon as I could if I were you, because I’m going to telephone the police and tell them Julia’s missing.”
Still laughing, Isobel Sowerby turned and plunged out into the darkness.
Frances went to the telephone, called the police and told them that she was very concerned because she had just discovered that Mrs. Darnell, who was suffering from a high fever and was in a state of shock after the death of her husband, had disappeared. Her car was missing too. Frances said that she had only just discovered this, because after the lunch that had been held in the house after the funeral, she had felt so tired that she had gone t
o her room to lie down and had fallen asleep and had only just woken up, gone into Mrs. Darnell’s room to see how she was and found it empty. She said that she knew that Mrs. Darnell had been in her room at about half past one, when she had taken some food and wine up to her and Mrs. Darnell had drunk a little wine but had refused the food. But at what time she had got up and gone out Frances had no idea, because she had been so sound asleep. She had heard nothing. Anything might have happened in the house without her being aware of it.
The man who answered her call said that someone would be out to see her shortly. Putting the telephone down, Frances fetched a dustpan and brush, swept up the ashes in the grate and flushed them down the lavatory. Then in truth feeling as tired as she had told the policeman that she had felt earlier, she began to clear up the dining-room and had started on the washing-up when the police arrived.
After that everything went surprisingly smoothly. The police soon found the wreck of the car on the rocks at the foot of the cliffs and the hammer and the blood-stained nightdress and dressing-gown in the boot. They also found fingerprints on the steering-wheel which were later identified as Mrs. Sowerby’s and they found some highly obscene photographs of her in a cupboard in Oliver Darnell’s studio. It had happened too that Major Sowerby, in a state of great anxiety at finding his wife missing when he returned from the golf club, had telephoned several friends to ask if she was with them, so without his intending it, he had destroyed any chance that she might have had of concocting an alibi. She told an absurd story about having been summoned by Mrs. Liley to help her get rid of the body of Julia Darnell, whom she and not Isobel Sowerby had murdered, but the story was not believed. There was a little doubt as to whether she could have handled the body by herself, but she was a big, powerful woman and it was thought that she could and she was charged with the murder. Frances stayed on in the Darnells’ cottage until after the inquest, then when her presence was no longer required, telephoned Mark and started for home.
As she drove, she fell into one of her rare moods of self-examination. She was not a nice person, she thought. Some people might even say of her that she was rather horrible. She did not really blame Mark for wanting to leave her and marry that little pudding of a woman who had been infatuated with him for the last five years. And if only he would give up his claim to the children, Frances would be quite willing to let him go. But they were the only people for whom she had ever felt any deep and lasting love. Or what she took to be love. It did not involve questioning whether it would be better for them to stay with her or with Mark, or which of their parents the girls themselves loved most. Even in her present mood of introspection, she did not ask herself that. She simply knew that they were hers, a possession from which it would be intolerable to be parted.
And horrible as perhaps she was, was she not an instrument of justice? Had she not arranged the arrest of Julia’s murderess, without herself or those two foolish young women, whose photographs she had good-naturedly burnt, becoming involved? No mud would stick to any of them. None of it would splash devastatingly on to the children. Only the guilty would suffer. So why should anyone criticize her? In a state of quiet satisfaction, she drove homewards to Mark.
SUICIDE?
It was Jimmie Marston, aged seven, who first saw the two eyes of light peering through the bushes at the mouth of the old quarry. Jimmie was used to thinking of the quarry as his own private place and went forward jealously to investigate.
He walked very softly, for there was something pretty queer, he thought, about a car that had been left with its lights on at the bottom of an old cart track when, after all, it was barely dusk.
But although he was cautious, he was not really scared and he was beside the car and had had a good look at what crouched motionless at the wheel before blind terror exploded in his mind.
Running, screaming, he made for home and what his parents were able to make of the story that he told them sent his father running to the quarry, then on, almost as shaken as his son, to the police. Some woman, he told Sergeant Buller, had driven her car down the old road into the quarry back of his cottage and nearly hacked her head off.
Only an hour earlier, in the nearby town, Bertram Wilde, a solicitor, had come to the police station to report the disappearance of his wife. He had begun by apologising distractedly for troubling the police when perhaps she would walk in at any moment, but she had been ill with flu he had explained, and suffering badly from the depression that so often goes with it.
“That’s really why I’m so worried,” he had said. “She’d still a temperature when I left the house this morning and I’m sure she’d no intention of getting up, yet when I came home to cook some lunch for her, since we’ve no domestic help now, she’d gone.
“And she must have gone quite soon after I left, because Dr. James tells me he called to see her about 10 o’clock and couldn’t get any answer. And what makes the situation particularly strange and alarming is that she – she appears not to have dressed. She’d taken her fur coat, but apart from that I really believe she’s wearing only her nightgown and bedroom slippers.”
A nightgown, slippers and a fur coat, all heavily stained with blood, were what the dead woman in the quarry was wearing.
She had left a note for her husband in the car. It said, “I’m so sorry, Bertie, I can’t help myself. You’ve always been so good to me, but it doesn’t make any difference.”
So there you were, said Sergeant Buller, reporting to Inspector Wylie, a plain case of doing herself in, poor creature, while the balance of her mind was disturbed.
To Inspector Wylie the case did not seem as plain as all that. He could not see why Jennifer Wilde should have driven to the quarry and cut her throat there when she had a comfortable gas oven handy. Also he distrusted suicide notes written on small scraps of paper.
“I like them better when they’ve a recognisable beginning, middle and end,” he said. “This could have been torn out of a letter about something quite different. Then there are those car lights. Why were they on? It was daylight when she got to the quarry, wasn’t it?”
After some thought he added, “I think I’ll go and talk to that doctor.”
He did not get much from Dr. James, except a confirmation that Mrs. Wilde had been suffering from a virus infection and that it had brought on a severe depression. However, from other people Wylie soon learned a number of interesting things, which happened to be mainly about Dr. James.
A young and attractive man, he had been seen about with Jennifer Wilde often enough to cause scandal, had always visited her uncommonly often when she was ill, or supposed to be ill, and this had usually been when her husband was at his office.
Her suicide, a friend of hers suggested to Wylie, had probably been caused by the strain of the situation. Another friend thought that she had made up her mind to leave her husband and then had suddenly found that Dr. James had no intention of ruining his career on her account.
Somewhat suspicious of the doctor, who struck Wylie as a smooth but fairly ruthless character, who might not find it difficult to take the life of a woman who had grown troublesome, the detective went on to see Bertram Wilde.
The bereaved husband, a nervous, stooping man of fifty, seemed dazed, as was only to be expected, wrung his hands and said to Wylie: “I ought never to have married her. I wanted her to be happy. I thought I could make her happy, but I ought to have known it couldn’t work. Poor Jennifer, I was too old for her, I ought to have known it.”
Wylie thought that the solicitor knew all about Dr. James but that the shock of his loss had made him incapable for the present of feeling vengefulness or even anger. He had shown no sign of suspecting the doctor of murder. But nor had the doctor attempted to direct suspicion at the husband. Uncertain what he thought, Wylie went back to worrying about the lights on the car.
“Why did she leave them on?” he asked Buller again. “Why did she turn them on at all? No fog that morning, was there?”
&nbs
p; “Well, why would a murderer go and leave the lights on?” Buller asked. “You’d think it’s the last thing he’d do.”
“That’s right,” said Wylie. “Suppose, for instance, it was the doctor who killed her and suppose he wanted her to disappear till we couldn’t tell by hours, or even days, how long she’d been dead, he might have dumped her in the car, driven it into his own garage and waited till dusk to drive it away to the quarry.
“He’d have turned the lights on then all right, sooner than risk being stopped for driving without them, but how could he ever have managed to forget to turn them off? If he’d looked back over his shoulder even once when he was leaving, he’d have seen them shining like beacons. The same with the husband, if he’d done it during the night before....”
Wylie stopped abruptly. He had just thought of the answer to his question. It is quite easy to forget to turn off the lights of a car when they have become practically invisible.
Next day the dead woman’s husband was arrested for the murder of his wife. He seemed almost glad by then to tell how he had caught her writing the letter of farewell to him from which he had torn the supposed suicide note and how he had killed her. But the problem of the lights clearly puzzled him as much as it had puzzled Wylie.
Bertram Wilde had started the drive to the quarry in the darkness of the early morning and had not noticed, as the sun rose, that the lights on the car had paled to nothing, had forgotten that he had ever switched them on and so had left them to signal brightly, with the return of darkness, to Jimmie Marston.
LOOK FOR TROUBLE
Mr. Pierre frowned at the frightened face of his receptionist which had just appeared behind him in the mirror. “What is it, Maureen?”
His faintly foreign whispering voice was sharp, though his expert fingers went on smoothly twisting the lilac hair of his elderly client on to rollers. “Not feeling unwell again, are you? We’re far too busy for any more time off.”
The Casebook of Jonas P. Jonas and Other Mysteries Page 15