“What was that?” asked Jeanie in a bated tone. “It sounded like—”
“It was a shot, wasn’t it?” said Sarah, with a nervous tremble in her voice.
“But of course in the country one’s always hearing shots!” said Jeanie.
“I thought it didn’t sound much like a sporting-gun,” said Sarah nervously.
“What then?”
“Well—” said Sarah, licking her lip. “Perhaps a rook-rifle. Miss Dasent has a rook-rifle. It might have been her.”
“Miss Dasent?”
“You know, Jeanie. She lives in Handleston. Old Dr. Dasent’s her father. She goes riding with Uncle Robert. And she comes shooting about here quite a lot. Uncle Robert lets her.”
“Oh, Marjorie!” murmured Jeanie, who had not recognised under the title “Miss Dasent” the plain, pleasant, sport-crazy girl she had met once or twice at Cleedons.
“She’s our guide-mistress, you see,” said Sarah, as if apologising for her use of the surname. Her lip trembled. The kitten clasped too tightly to her bosom mewed indignantly. “Oh, Jeanie! You don’t think—”
“My dear, we’re two sillies to listen at all to a gun being let off at a rabbit. The country’s full of guns and rabbits, isn’t it, worse luck!”
As she spoke, Jeanie glanced out of the smeared window in the crutch of the roof, half hoping to see a man with a gun crossing the lane to lull their foolish fears. She saw no man, but what she did see made her approach nearer to the window and rub it quickly clean.
Two women were standing in the lane some twenty yards down. One was Myfanwy Peel, the other Agnes Molyneux. Jeanie noted the pleasant plum-colour of Agnes’s dress before she noticed her face, but when she saw her face she became oblivious of everything else. Agnes’s face was a clayey white upon which the delicate touches of make-up showed hard-edged and strange, like paint on the face of a grotesque doll. She was clutching at Myfanwy’s arm. Her lips parted stiffly, writhingly, but whether she spoke or not Jeanie could not tell. She saw Myfanwy with a crude, cruel gesture shake off that clinging hand and pass on quickly up the lane. Agnes looked wildly round, and at the same time Jeanie, taking up an old horseshoe that lay among the hay on the floor, broke the glass in the window. Smashing the jagged edges away, she leant cautiously out and cried:
“Agnes! Agnes!”
Agnes looked up at her. Jeanie had never in her life seen a look so sick, so despairing on a woman’s face. Agnes’s eyes seemed scarcely to recognise Jeanie, but glanced up and then wandered round her. She tried to speak, and could not.
“All right, Agnes! I’ll come down!”
“Oh, what is it?” cried Sarah at her back, in a voice panicky with fright. “Jeanie! What is it?”
Agnes put out a vague hand as if to feel the air, and then, with a queer, limp motion as though she were indeed the doll her make-up made her look, let her head drop forward, her shoulders, her waist, her knees, and soundlessly fell, and lay face downwards in her plum-coloured gown in the mud of the lane.
Chapter Three
DEATH IN THE ORCHARD
Slithering down the loft-ladder, running out into the sunlight, stumbling along the rutty lane, Jeanie had a dreadful prevision of herself lifting Mrs. Molyneux from the mud and seeing her face clayey and dead, mud-streaked, with half-opened eyes and blood oozing through and darkening the cloth of her gown. One could be a long time about one’s dying, shot in a part not vital. And here, so soon after the shot, lay Agnes still as the dead in the muddy lane.
Agnes’s face was pale enough, and splashed with mud, but the long fair lashes lay quietly on the cheeks, the lips, so strangely out of tone with the rosy cosmetic upon them, were quietly half parted. Briskly chafing the cold hands, Jeanie heard a squeaky voice utter uncertainly:
“You ought to undo her stays.”
It was Sarah, almost as white in the face as Agnes herself.
“I don’t think she wears any,” said Jeanie helplessly, “but you could go and get some water from the pump in the yard. There’s bound to be a pail or something.”
However, almost as soon as Sarah had sped away, Agnes sighed and moved. Her eyes opened slowly. Her lips looked dry and cracked. She looked too tired, too sick, having made the effort to lift her eyelids, to move another muscle. But after a moment memory came back into her blank eyes. Her face contorted. A restless movement passed over her body. She gasped:
“Jeanie! Jeanie!”
“What is it, Agnes?”
“Robert’s dead, Jeanie. Somebody shot him. Robert’s dead, Jeanie. I saw him. Oh, Jeanie, I feel so sick! I feel so awful!”
Kneeling in the wet lane, supported against Jeanie’s shoulder, she fell to trembling violently, like a frightened animal or a patient in a fever.
“Where is he?” asked Jeanie. “Agnes, do you know what you’re saying?”
“Yes. In the orchard. Oh God! Oh God! Jeanie! Oh, Jeanie!”
She struggled with Jeanie’s help to her feet. Standing, wildly dishevelled, covered in mud, she pushed her hair away from her eyes, she moaned distractedly:
“Oh, look at my dress! Oh, Jeanie!”
Jeanie, supporting her, looked towards the yard for Sarah, and saw her coming slowly and carefully along carrying an enamel basin full of water between her hands.
“Oh ducky, you have been a long time!”
“I couldn’t find a bucket! I had to get the chickens’ basin from the orchard!” explained Sarah, whose face looked, poor child, whiter and clammier even than Agnes’s own.
“Well, we don’t need it now. Will you take your aunt up to the house as quickly as possible? I must go to the orchard at once. Don’t look so scared, darling. It’s just an accident, you know—somebody shooting rabbits and—and just winged your uncle, perhaps. I don’t suppose he’s badly hurt. Go along now. And find Sir Henry Blundell or Dr. Hall or both of them, and quietly, without making a fuss, ask them to come to the orchard. Got that?”
“Yes, Jeanie,” said the child obediently, licking her pale lips. She glanced with a sort of stony horror towards the orchard gate, and did as she was told.
When Jeanie, with a dreadful feeling of unwillingness, entered the orchard there seemed to be no one there but a speckled hen strayed from the barn-yard and pecking about for grubs, giving the orchard, even in its wintry gauntness, a homely, peaceful quality quite at variance with Jeanie’s feelings. A ladder stood up against one of the tall old trees which still remained among the more recently planted ones. There was no one on the ladder. But someone lay at its foot, and lay very still.
Jeanie’s heart gave two great thuds, and she found herself walking slowly, slowly across the grass. She heard, not far away, a car start up and drive off, humming on an ever-rising note into silence.
Could a man lie as still as this, and not be dead? Perhaps, but he could not stare up at one so blankly from a face so queerly pale around the patchy, weatherbeaten cheeks. He would have to blink. He could not stare in such a long surprise. His hand lying upon the turf, might be as cold, but not his cheek. He might bleed, but not from a small black hole in the temple.
Jeanie rose quickly from her knees and turned away. There was a sort of blankness upon her inner lids. Raising her eyes from the grass, she saw two men coming in at the orchard gate. One, she knew, was brisk little Dr. Hall, the other, tall and loose-limbed, she supposed, Sir Henry Blundell. They wore, both of them, that slightly abstracted, slightly self-important air with which men try to express their sense of the gravity of events.
“I think Mr. Molyneux’s dead,” said Jeanie baldly, as they came up.
“Oh, don’t say that!” responded Dr. Hall, dropping upon his knee. There was a certain lack of conviction in his voice.
Sir Henry, who had been looking at the still body at his feet with that remote, inexpressive stare which is often used to cover a good deal of nervous distress, turned and looked suddenly at Jeanie. He had that kind of blue, well-focused, direct eye for which the word “piercing�
�� scarcely seems exaggerated. He was a good-looking, long, elderly man of the grey-faced soldier type.
“Did you say you saw this happen, Miss Halliday?”
“No. But I heard the shot. At least, I suppose it was the shot.”
“What direction did it seem to come from?”
“I don’t know! We were in the hay-loft, you see, Sarah and I. We heard a shot. It might have been from anywhere. It sounded fairly close.”
Dr. Hall rose stiffly and brushed at the knees of his trousers.
“I’m afraid there’s nothing I can do. He died instantly, I should say. A bullet in the brain. See here.”
He pointed to the small black hole in the left temple round which the blood was already clotting.
“The cause of death’s pretty obvious. The only thing that puzzles me is the way he’s lying. On his back like that. I should have expected a man hit like that to fall on his face.”
“But suppose he fell out of the tree,” said Jeanie.
Both men looked at the tall old tree with the ladder leaning against it.
“I should say there’s very little doubt he did,” said Sir Henry. “And, in that case, it may be very difficult to fix the direction of the shot. I suppose it couldn’t possibly have been suicide?”
Dr. Hall briskly shook his head, looking down at the body of Robert Molyneux, smiling faintly as a specialist smiles at the absurdities of the layman.
“Absolutely not. That shot was fired from quite a distance. I’ll be able to tell you more after the autopsy. But you can put the idea of suicide out of your head right away. Some careless ass after birds, perhaps, down in the meadows—”
“‘Careless,’” said Sir Henry gravely, “would scarcely be the word, I think. How could such an accident have happened?”
Dr. Hall shrugged slightly. Man’s carelessness, he seemed to imply, was equal to anything.
“There’s nothing more I can do here. I’d better go in and have a look at Mrs. Molyneux.”
“Would you ring up the police station at Handleston? Say that I want Superintendent Finister to come out here at once and bring a couple of men with him. I shall wait here till they come. Oh, and Doctor! Ask Denham if he’d mind coming to me out here and bringing his camera and gear with him. Some photographs may be useful later. This tree, for instance.”
A branch almost sawn through hung limply, swinging a little, towards the grass. It was a long slender branch, about a couple of inches through, and had been sawn through almost to the bark about two feet from the fork of the tree against which the ladder stood. A small pruning-saw lay in the grass below. The stub from which the bough dangled pointed roughly towards the northwest hedge of the orchard, near which stood a little rickety wooden shed known as the lambing-shed.
“That ought to give us some idea of how the poor chap was standing, anyway. He was in the act of sawing through that bough when the shot took him, that’s pretty clear.”
Sir Henry Blundell picked up the pruning-saw and climbed up the ladder, the foot of which pointed towards the orchard entrance gate. When he had gone up about half a dozen rungs he placed the saw at right angles to the half-sawn bough and settled himself comfortably as though to continue the work Robert Molyneux had begun.
“How’s that?” he called down to Jeanie. His left profile was towards the hay-barn.
“It looks as if the shot must have come from there,” she said, pointing towards the barns.
“Yes,” he agreed, descending. “From almost due south.”
“Unless,” said Jeanie slowly, “he turned his head.”
“You mean, somebody may have called him, made him turn?”
“Perhaps. Or he might have turned his head or altered his position just because he was tired. Sawing’s a tiring job. One looks around one and takes little rests sometimes.”
Sir Henry smiled politely, looking with narrowed eyes around the orchard as if he half expected to see the murderer still lurking there. Suddenly with an exclamation he strode towards the lambing-shed, leaving Jeanie to contemplate the apple-tree, the ladder and the bough. A sound broke on her ears as she stood there which she might have taken for distant thunder had it not coincided with a man’s voice uttering adjurations to his horses. It was the hay-wagon rumbling back down the farm-track from the common. In a moment it came into view, piled high with bracken, led by the man whose blue shirt Jeanie had admired a thousand hours ago. Another man rode on the shaft. The wagon turned into the barn with a great clatter.
“Who are those?” asked Sir Henry, returning to Jeanie’s side, looking down the slope towards the wagon turning in at the great hay-barn door.
“Two of the men carting litter from the common. I saw them before. And I remember now that just before we heard the shot I heard that thundery noise—that noise the wheels of a wagon make. It was the wagon going off empty towards the common, I suppose.”
“Look at this, Miss Halliday. It was lying on the ground just inside the shed there. It’s perfectly dry, in spite of the damp ground and the damp air, and I am certain it hasn’t been there long.”
He held out on an envelope the stub of a cigarette.
“A ‘Honeybine,’ ” said Sir Henry. “Somebody’s been inside that shed to-day.”
“Then—” Jeanie looked up from the fag-end and met Sir Henry’s eyes fixed grimly on her face. “It wasn’t an accident.”
“I never thought it was,” said Sir Henry. “Carelessness has its limits.”
Suddenly the orchard grass seemed to Jeanie to whisper with the stalking, tiptoeing footsteps of evil, death dodged in a horrible game of hide-and-seek from apple-tree to apple-tree. She shivered. She said, to disperse these horrors:
“Perhaps Mr. Molyneux left it there himself.”
“I thought he was a non-smoker.”
“Oh yes. He was.”
Poor Robert Molyneux! He had prided himself on his abstemious habits, held that a man’s health of mind and body is his own to make or mar, lived the simplest strenuous life and never been ill. He had immoderately disliked both doctors and doctoring. Now here he lay, helpless under the hands of little Dr. Hall, at whose cocksure assumptions he had so often smiled.
“Well,” said Jeanie indistinctly, “if I can’t be any more use here, I think I’ll go in.”
At the orchard gate she encountered a tall young man in horn-rimmed spectacles, carrying a camera and tripod. He wore a half-scared, half-avid look. He spoke in a solemn whisper.
“Is Sir Henry here?”
“Over there.”
“Oh yes! I say! What a—what a—”
The young man could not, all in a moment, transfix the right adjective. Nodding, hurrying on towards the house, Jeanie thought she heard the word “shocking” dropped softly on the air behind her. But she really could not, at this moment and in this state of mind, linger and listen to young Mr. Denham pursuing adjectives.
Chapter Four
LADY’S CHAIN
Dr. Hall was coming out of Agnes’s bedroom as Jeanie arrived at the door. He wore a tiptoeing, sad, sympathetic look.
“Mrs. Molyneux is quieter now. I’ve given her a little sedative. After she’s seen Sir Henry, I’ll give her something stronger. Sleep is a great boon at such times.” He looked at Jeanie with a professional gleam in his eye. “You look a little shaken yourself, Miss Halliday, if I may say so.”
“Oh, I’m all right,” said Jeanie somewhat brusquely.
But entering Agnes’s bedroom, and meeting her own reflection in one of the many mirrors, she was not surprised that Dr. Hall had looked on her as a possible patient. ‘Shaken’ was, she thought, a polite word to use of so ghastly an aspect. Hastily she seized a comb from the dressing-table and ran it through her disordered locks.
Somebody moved in the big dim-lit room, and Jeanie, turning, saw Miss Wills standing on the hearth-rug in front of the electric fire. She had not realised that there was anyone in the room besides Agnes lying on the bed, and was absurdly irritate
d to see Miss Wills. Jeanie pitied, but did not much like, Sarah’s tutor Tamsin Wills, one of those queer unhappy people who mask a profound self-dissatisfaction under an appearance of cold conceit.
“How are you now, Agnes?”
It was Miss Wills who answered, as though she were Agnes’s nurse:
“She’s quieter now. We’re trying to get her to sleep.”
“I think Sir Henry wants to see her first.”
“Let him wait!” said Tamsin Wills with a short pugnacious laugh. It was evident that she would be only too glad to have the chance of defending Agnes from the inquisitions of the police, with her body, if necessary. Jeanie remembered Sarah’s irreverent remarks about her tutor. Agnes, charming, selfish creature, had always had this capacity for arousing devotion. As Jeanie looked down at her old friend’s soft hair, of that shade of ash-gold which does not for a very long time show the encroachments of ash-grey, Agnes looked up suddenly with swimming eyes.
“Oh, Jeanie! Don’t leave me!”
“I won’t, my dear!”
No doubt Agnes had uttered the same plea to Tamsin Wills and would to everybody who came near her. She must always be the centre of her little stage, poor Agnes; she must always have her audience.
“Agnes, I think Sir Henry Blundell would like to see you before you go to sleep.”
“Sleep! I shan’t sleep!”
Miss Wills interposed eagerly:
“You needn’t see him if you don’t want to, Agnes.”
“Oh, of course I must see him,” said Mrs. Molyneux, more pettishly than tragically. “If only you wouldn’t talk so loud, Tamsin! It goes right through my head!” Tamsin flushed a deep dull red, and said nothing. Jeanie fancied she saw her lids redden behind her horn-rimmed glasses. Tamsin Wills was a heavily-built tall girl of about Jeanie’s age, which was twenty-six, with a self-conscious taste in picturesque clothes that did not suit her. She was wearing a pair of green cord gardening breeches and hand-knitted stockings, with a shirt of tomato-coloured silk, its sleeves rolled up her thick strong forearms. She had the stiff, inelastic pose of the athlete who has taken to a sedentary life. Five years ago she had been a first-class hockey-player, but one would not think it now, to look at her. She had grown heavy for her age, and stooped. She wore her hair, which was thick and black and might, with more attention, have looked beautiful, knotted in great coils that bristled with hair-pins over her ears.
Let Him Lie Page 3