The Assize of the Dying

by Edith Pargeter

  ‘The middle of an early September evening, after a lovely day. The windows would be open.’ She got up restlessly and went to the wide window, outside which the trees of the garden, now leafless, spread at a little distance their delicate bony hands. Beyond these filigree screens she could see glimpses of the reddish levels of tennis courts. ‘That’s the club grounds, isn’t it? In late summer no one would be able to see in here, but leaves wouldn’t keep sounds from getting in and out. If she’d screamed, somebody would have heard her. It’s no distance to those courts, and on a fine evening at the end of summer there’d be somebody playing as long as the light lasted.’

  ‘They never found anyone who had heard anything,’ said Malachi, coming to her shoulder and gazing out with her at the grey skies and the bare olive-green of the hedges.

  ‘Then there never was anything to hear.’ She turned, and stood looking in silence for a long time at the settee on which Zoë’s beautiful dead body had lain, as elegant as in sleep except that she had drawn up her knees at the assault of the hands about her neck, and slashed across the silk of the cushion at her feet with the ornate buckle of one shoe. There had been no cry, and no fight for her life. Why not? It takes only an instant to shriek aloud, not more than a couple of seconds to bound to the open window and send a shout echoing unmistakably across the garden to the tennis courts beyond the hedge.

  ‘Malachi, I don’t understand at all. Granted a casual friend could have walked in on her here without startling her in the least, still he couldn’t reach the point of touching her, of putting his hands round her neck, without making her aware that everything was wrong. If she got up from here to greet him – the man she expected – still she was quite at ease about his visit, and she went back to her place. And he was able to follow her, to lay hands on her, without frightening her – so that she never even had time, between realising and dying, to utter a sound. Until he actually tightened his hands round her throat, she never suspected anything was wrong. Do you see what it means?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Malachi. ‘It means what the whole set-up of the dress and the dinner meant. It means a lover.’

  ‘It couldn’t be anyone else, could it?’ Margaret laid her hand wonderingly where the bright, famous, heedless head had rested. ‘And even then, I still wonder how he managed it. I should think she was a woman of quick reactions. Say he was here on the settee with her, his weight lying over her would keep her from struggling, his arms holding her would prevent her from breaking free or fighting him off. But even then there must have been a moment when she knew. Even if he had complete control of his face, there must have been a moment when the sense of his touch changed, when the hands went to her throat. But she never uttered a sound.’

  ‘There might have been quite enough noise and chatter going on in the park to cover any sound she made.’

  ‘There may, but it seems a risk for him to take. Look at the distance! You could toss a pebble into the middle of that first court if the trees weren’t there. Would he take a chance like that?’

  ‘He was taking risks whatever he did.’

  ‘Yes, but intelligently – because, you know, he didn’t leave behind one touch, one hint, of his own personality. Nothing but this imaginative picture we’ve been making.’ She reared her head back suddenly, lifting to his face her large, dedicated eyes, dark with an intent gravity. ‘Malachi, this was a very single-minded soul – this murderer. I don’t think anyone or anything outside the bounds of himself and his own interests was real to him. Do you remember the medical evidence well? I’d just be interested to know – did they say there were any facial injuries?’

  Mystified, gazing at her with a curiously wary face, he replied slowly: ‘They said there was extensive cyanosis, of course – and some local bruising of the lips. From the congestion of blood, I suppose – at least there didn’t seem to be any traceable marks of fingers, except round the throat.’

  ‘No,’ said Margaret gently, ‘not fingers. I’m beginning to know quite a lot about this man. I know now how he stopped her mouth, right up to the moment when he was quite safe and she had no breath any longer for crying out. It wasn’t his fingers. It was his lips that were hard over hers. He was kissing her when he began to kill her.’

  ‘A lover of Zoë’s?’ said Charlie, elevating his mobile eyebrows. ‘My dear girl, that makes everything easy! Don’t you realise that they come in their hundreds round this town? You’re faced with a selection from half the presentable men in London between, say, twenty-five and forty. A needle in a haystack presents much the same problem, I’m told. Let me get you another drink, Meg – what are you on?’

  ‘No, thanks, I’ve had my allowance.’

  ‘Rouault? Yes, do keep me company! Are you sticking to beer?’ He came back with his own recharged glass and Malachi’s tankard, and dropped again into his corner seat. For Charlie he was unusually grave; the slight, tender curl of the strongly marked lips was a smile of half-rueful reminiscence rather than amusement or gaiety. ‘When I came out of the RAF in 1946 I was in a bad way for a bit. No more excitement, no more easy success, no more reliable thrills. Lucky me, I fell in with Zoë. There was all the excitement a man ever needed, and the success, if it wasn’t easy, was extremely satisfying. I don’t know how well you knew your cousin? No – well – she was out of her time, really. She belonged in the Italian Renaissance, or perhaps ancient Greece – she’d have made a superb hetæra. They don’t come these days without a touch of the commercial, but Zoë hadn’t any – not a drop of venal blood in her veins. She favoured you of her own personal will, or not at all. And when she went, she went without any asking leave.’

  He met Malachi’s measuring eyes, and shrugged and smiled. ‘I was one of a long procession – a very small incident. She came to me from a poet, and left me for a painter. Come to think of it, if you really want to know how she looked in her heyday, you should go to Frank Franks. He painted and sketched her steadily for over a year, and as far as I know he kept all the best things he did of her. And if you’re really serious about looking up all her old admirers, you could do worse than start with him. There’s a man who had it very badly for Zoë – very badly indeed. But I told you, you’re setting out to sift a whole generation.’

  ‘I hardly think we need consider the wealthy ones—’ began Margaret.

  ‘What wealthy ones?’ The hollow dimples dived inward in Charlie’s long cheeks. ‘Are you trying to tell me you’re looking for some poor devil who loved Zoë, and is hard up for money? Which of us isn’t? The poor girl doesn’t give you much help, actually, does she? She made a lot of money herself, and threw it about like mad – she didn’t care if the fellows she happened to like hadn’t a bean. You’ll find more than half her admirers live in a chronic state of brokeness, and most of the others just get by. Nobody’s rich any more – not below the age of fifty, anyhow.’

  ‘I’ve heard of this man Franks,’ said Malachi thoughtfully. ‘What is he? A successful Academy painter? I got the impression he was quite a fashionable man.’

  ‘Oh, lord, no – strictly a Left Bank type. But yes, fashionable enough in his way. He does all right.’

  ‘I’ve met him once or twice,’ said Margaret. ‘I think he’d remember me. We could go and see him.’ Charlie watched them exchange understanding glances, and smiled his faintly wry, unquenchably merry smile. ‘I never saw Zoë – I’m beginning to think it might be important,’ said Margaret. ‘Even if the best we can do now is a portrait.’

  ‘It might, at that,’ said Charlie softly, staring into his memory with the thoughtful tenderness back on his lips. ‘But, listen, have you two seriously thought what you’re doing?’ He put Zoë away from him with a last lingering look of pleasure, and became as neatly practical as a new machine. ‘The poor devil’s dead! I never thought he’d go that way, I thought he was set to fight to the last ditch and I even thought he might win. And I’m sorry! But neither you nor anyone else can bring him back now.’

  ‘
No – we know that.’ It was plain from Margaret’s tone that she understood that this consideration should have made all the difference; and plainer still that in fact it made none.

  ‘All right, you’re going to put right what’s been done wrong and set justice up again in her own esteem. I can sympathise with that. But all the same, I should think carefully what you’re taking on, before you get too involved in this business to back out.’

  ‘We won’t drag you into it,’ Margaret promised him with a preoccupied smile. ‘I know you think he probably did it – that makes all the difference. But we’re sure he didn’t, and feeling like that, how can we let it alone? Especially as no one else is interested.’

  Charlie spread his elbows across the table, and looked from one face to the other with a serious frown. ‘That’s exactly where you’re wrong, and exactly what I’m pointing out. Someone else is interested, or will be, just as soon as you seem to be getting anywhere. Supposing, of course, that you’re right, and Stevenson was innocent. Somebody’s going to be very interested indeed, when you ferret out the first real line of inquiry.’

  Her mind was hardly on what he was saying. She said indifferently: ‘Oh, you mean the police!’

  ‘I mean the murderer!’ said Charlie.

  Frank Franks had a studio in Chelsea, a Vandyke beard and a dedicated eye which exercised itself, all the while he talked with them, in the fierce, forceful shapes of light and shadow which composed Malachi’s face, and the fascinating patterns of wintry sunlight in Margaret’s hair, which was of a colour neither honeyed nor brown nor gold, but had its moments of being all three. They were not, for him, people, but arrangements of form and colour, and a dual and suspect curiosity was the only non-visual quality they had. He understood that Malachi’s inheritance gave him a natural right to want to know the truth about Zoë’s murder, but he had – they could be heard in his voice and seen in his every movement – reservations about the weight and urgency of such a curiosity as they displayed. For a cousin who had hardly known Zoë in her lifetime, this passionate concern seemed to him obsessive; and the girl was not even connected with the case at all.

  He was, however, an artist, and allowed other people their obsessions if they respected his. He made them free of his studio, and produced for them a dozen sketches and two canvases. He had very little to say, and that was concerned far more closely with the formation of Zoë’s body than the motions of her spirit. It was difficult to think of him as a lover.

  The sketches, all but a couple of delicate decorations composed as much of drapery as of the woman within, were nude studies, spare and chaste and faceless. The smaller canvas was a woman asleep, relaxed as a cat, a magnificent arm flung up above the head, the face shadowed by a great red-brown wave of hair, heavy and smooth as silk. The larger canvas he set up for them with a disdainful smile upon an easel, and turned it to the light for their inspection.

  ‘This is more what you want. I kept it for two reasons, because it’s unconscionably like her and by the time I finished it I no longer had the reality to look at – and because I was ashamed to sell it. My worst lapse, I call that. I did it to please her, but she had too much innate sense to be pleased with it, after all. Still, it’s Zoë. If you want to know what she looked like, well, there she is.’

  There she was indeed, in probably the nearest thing to a calculated Academy portrait he would ever paint, a half-length, seated against silver-grey curtains, in a picture frock of deep, soft blue, with a tightly swathed bodice and full, cascading skirt. From the foam of tulle the upper part of her body, naked-shouldered, grew like a vigorous flower, thrusting upward, erect and opulent towards the light, the head with its great heavy helmet of russet hair poised challengingly upon a throat long, rounded and full. The face had a splendid repose, assured and humorous and good-natured. It was easy to see how she might have afforded release to a great many young men disorientated by the transition from war to peace. There was room in that large presence to shake oneself free from all cramping fears that excitement was over.

  ‘How could any man bear to kill her?’ said Margaret, staring at the noble throat. ‘It doesn’t seem as if there could possibly be anything to gain that would pay for what he’d be losing.’

  The painter shot her a darkly interested glance, and agreed abruptly: ‘It would certainly be like pulling down the house on top of himself.’

  ‘She was really like that?’

  ‘As sumptuous as that. Five foot five, and slender, but larger than life-size. And I made a magazine cover out of her! Look at the detail! My God, a new pre-Raphaelite tragedy! Every fold of the tulle is there – even the ear-clips you could pick out anywhere after seeing this. No wonder I suppressed it!’

  The ear-clips, now that he mentioned them, were certainly painted with the precision of a miniaturist, and were worth looking at. Margaret had never seen any quite like them. They were of the exact blue of the dress, and, judging by their glitter, were composed of sapphires – single germander speedwell flowers, with a tiny leaf and stem of green enamel on silver; the preciosity of the painting was such that there was no mistaking the materials.

  ‘She always wore those clips with that dress – I never saw them apart. They were a present from some fellow back in the days of her innocence.’ He passed his fingertips over the encrustations of impasto with which he had achieved the glitter, and made a wry face. ‘It’s the dress she was wearing when they found her – I suppose you knew that?’

  ‘I recognised it from the descriptions,’ said Margaret, her eyes fixed darkly upon the shining drops, the same, it seemed, which had been ripped from Zoë’s ear-lobes before the life was quite gone out of her. She pictured a hand, gloved now, turning the heavy head from one cheek to the other upon the cushion, plucking at the stones, leaving a minute drop or two of blood upon the silk under the shadow of the smooth hair. These, then, were the jewels which might still carry, somewhere in the infinitesimal hollows of their setting, traces of Zoë’s blood.

  She did not wonder that the really striking thing about the dress had not impressed itself upon the police mind, not upon Malachi’s now. It was evidence for a woman, not a man. Nor did she point it out to him until they had taken their leave of Frank Franks, and were walking through a faint, silvery mist along the Embankment.

  ‘Not much to be made out of that,’ said Malachi ruefully, ‘unless it’s that he isn’t by any means as single-minded about his art as he pretends. To hear him talk, she meant nothing to him but a set of values in light and form. But did you see his hand shake when he touched her? Do you suppose, after all, this could have been a crime of jealousy? It would be good cover to make it look like a sordid murder for theft – nothing could be much further from a crime passionnel, could it?’

  Margaret shook her head. ‘No, if that had been true, he might have taken some of the jewellery from her bedroom, but he wouldn’t have made a clean sweep, even to the clips out of her ears. No, I’m sure of it, she was killed for what she’d fetch – somebody looked round for an easy source of income, to tide him over a crisis. And she came easy. Yes, even Zoë. Everybody’s easy for somebody, it seems, and this man was Zoë’s Achilles’, heel. Usually they loved her, and she let herself be loved, but once, just once – the positions were reversed. This once, I’m sure, it wasn’t Zoë who got bored and moved on, but the man. She must have loved him so much that even after several years he had only to make the first move of reconciliation, and she was ready to sweep everybody else out of her life to make room for him to come back. That’s why the little dinner à deux, that’s why the dress. Didn’t you notice anything odd about the dress?’

  He was looking down at her, wide-eyed, a little alarmed by the clairvoyant air she had in her absorption. ‘No, I can’t say I did. It was a very handsome one, of course, but—’

  ‘And the date of the painting, you didn’t notice that? I think I should have known even without the date, but evening dresses don’t change as drastically as all tha
t, and I suppose a man wouldn’t see much wrong with it. But he’d signed and dated the picture – it was finished in May 1948. That means that on the night of her death she was wearing a dress six years old. What an extraordinary thing for Zoë to do!’

  Malachi’s face cleared, though his enlightened smile was faintly sceptical of this crystal-gazing attitude towards evidence. ‘I see! So that’s why you’re deducing that she wore it for a six-year-old love she’d unexpectedly recovered out of the past. A dress associated with former happiness!’

  ‘Why, unless it had a very special meaning for her,’ said Margaret simply, ‘do you suppose a woman like Zoë would even keep a dress as long as that? No, we needn’t bother any more about Zoë’s recent affairs – it couldn’t have been any of them. The man we want is someone from around the year 1948, someone from the heyday of the blue dress.’

  ‘Someone, in fact,’ said Malachi, startled, ‘from the period of Frank Franks himself. Do you suppose that’s why he was so casual – and so co-operative?’

  Margaret was called to the telephone, late that evening, to hear with a shock of pleasure the expected voice. Malachi was himself, over the telephone, as firmly as he was in the flesh, though the transmission contrived to flatten a little the full tones of his voice, and made him sound more transatlantic than when she was in his presence. The most striking effect of this experience of hearing without seeing him was to put out of mind all the contradictory, womanish subtleties of liquid eyes and sensitive mouth, and make the iron part of him more apparent.

  ‘Margaret? I didn’t fetch you out of the bath, or anything? Are you alone?’

  ‘You sound like a conspirator,’ she said. ‘But if it matters, I am alone. I’ve got something to tell you, too – not very much, but it just might mean something’s moving. Who speaks first?’

  ‘Go ahead! I can wait.’