“No. What for?”
“For the weapon, you know. It must be somewhere.”
“Oh, the weapon! Of course!”
Sarah was as still as a stick. Her stillness was more noticeable than movement. Jeanie, putting an arm around her shoulders, felt her whole body stiff as wood.
“We think now the murderer probably hid it immediately after the murder. And of course the pond’s the obvious place. Too obvious. Still, a criminal in a panic doesn’t always avoid the obvious so well as he’d like to. But they haven’t found anything yet.”
The superintendent spoke with a kind of dreamy detachment.
“What do you expect to find?”
“Well, there’s this pistol missing from the gun-room at Cleedons, and nobody seems to know anything about it. There on the morning of the murder, so the housemaid says. Not there since. Somebody must know something about that. A Colt automatic target-pistol. That’s what’s missing from the gun-room, and that’s what we should expect to find. But I keep an open mind. It wouldn’t surprise me to find a miniature rifle. Not so easily hidden as an automatic, you know. More likely to be thrown away on the spur of the moment. This Colt automatic that’s missing from the gun-room is only ten and a half inches long. It would go in a coat-pocket. But a miniature rifle’s a thing you can’t hide so easily. You might easily get in a real fright and throw it in a pond or push it down a drain.”
He spoke gently, sadly, and his eyes never left that mackintosh of Sarah’s.
“Or a rabbit-hole,” he added softly.
He looked thoughtfully at Sarah, who was staring straight in front of her. The trees that ringed the three of them round were quite dark now. This is the hour, thought Jeanie, for witchcraft and the visiting of tombs. She glanced at Sarah, and saw her lips silently move, and wondered whether she were appealing once again desperately to the spirits of the tumulus to help her. She shivered.
“It’s cold.”
“Yes, and will be dark soon,” agreed Superintendent Finister. He looked paternally at Sarah. “I shouldn’t do any more digging now. Let old Grim sleep in peace for to-night.”
He spoke kindly, and picking Sarah’s mackintosh up from the ground held it out for her to put on. She made one jerk to prevent him, then gave it up and stood quite still.
“Hullo!” said Superintendent Finister without great surprise, looking at the small rifle which lay exposed upon the grass.
Sarah said nothing for a moment. She shoved her arms down the sleeves of the coat that Finister still held out for her, and wrapped it round herself and remarked in a high, unnatural voice:
“I suppose we might as well go home, Jeanie. It’s too dark to do any shooting now.”
With exaggerated nonchalance she stooped to pick the weapon up from the ground, but Finister was before her.
“Shooting!” echoed he with a faint smile, looking at the label on the stock. “You’re a bit young for handling fire-arms, aren’t you, missie?”
“Perhaps,” conceded Sarah. With dignity she added: “Could I have my rifle, please?” Her voice trembled.
“This isn’t your rifle, my dear.”
“It is.”
Sarah held out her hand and looked Finister straight in the eyes. Her own eyes looked small and very dark. His were thoughtful, not unkindly. Jeanie murmured:
“Oh, Sarah dear!”
“It is,” repeated Sarah brazenly. “So give it me, please. I suppose a person can shoot rabbits on their own uncle’s farm—” her voice faltered—“without being a criminal?”
“I suppose so too, my dear, but you haven’t been shooting rabbits, and this isn’t your rifle.”
“It is.”
“Come,” said Finister kindly. “Miss Molyneux, this is no use. I shall find out soon enough, you know, whom this rifle belongs to.”
“My uncle. It’s not exactly mine, but—”
“Missie, we know all the guns your uncle had at Cleedons, and only one of them’s missing, a target-pistol.”
“This is a new one. He bought it a day or two before he—before he—”
Finister shook his head.
“Is this any use, ducky?” asked Jeanie. She was startled at the look the child threw her.
“You said you’d help me!”
“But, Sarah!”
Feeling a traitor, Jeanie looked helplessly at Finister.
“Come,” said he briskly. “Why do you suppose I followed you up here, my dear?”
“Don’t call me your dear!”
Taken a trifle aback, Finister laughed shortly.
“Well! Why do you suppose I followed you up here? I was watching my men at work on the pond on the common. I saw you come out through the gap in the hedge of the Cleedons orchard. You looked around. I shouldn’t have noticed you particularly, perhaps, only you looked around you as if you didn’t want to be seen. You couldn’t see me, I was among the trees at the edge of the pond. I saw you stoop down and disappear. You crawled under the culvert, didn’t you, that crosses the ditch there? When you came out, you had something in your hand—a rifle, I thought. You put it under your coat very quickly and sauntered off. I followed you. I followed you through the orchard and the barnyard and across the road. So you see, my d— Miss Molyneux, it would really be better to tell me all about it.”
There was a pause. Two little spots of red burnt in the child’s pale cheeks. She did not look at Finister nor at Jeanie, but at the tree-tops as if she envied the birds. She said brokenly:
“I shan’t tell you a damned thing.”
“Well, miss, you know we can easily find out.”
“Find out and be damned. Can I have my rifle?”
“No. I’m keeping that.”
“Keep it then, and go to hell with it.”
“Oh Sarah!” murmured Jeanie, as they made their way down the side of the tumulus and up the bank among the tearing brambles and spiky sapling-stumps almost invisible in the dusk. “What’s the trouble? Hadn’t you better tell me?”
“So that you can go straight and tell Finister, I suppose,” said Sarah coldly. She stumbled over a rabbit-hole and recovered herself, with dignity.
Jeanie sighed. Confederacy between the adult and the child had its difficulties.
“I might want to,” she admitted. “But I could promise not to, if you liked.”
“To the death?”
“Well—it would depend whose death,” said Jeanie, feebly joking.
They passed out of the gate of the Cole Harbour meadow on to the chilly, wind-whistling road. Sarah paused, carefully replacing the chain.
“No, Jeanie, I can’t,” she muttered at last. “It isn’t only me, you see. There’s another person.”
Jeanie stopped and looked at her young friend’s face, pearly white in the dusk with huge dark eyes that evaded her glance.
“Have you promised that other person not to tell?”
“No, but—”
“Then change your mind and tell me!”
Something in Sarah’s nervous contraction when Jeanie laid a gentle hand upon her shoulder, something in the sudden focusing of her cold, fearful glance, her movement like a startled animal’s woke an echo in Jeanie’s mind. She remembered how she had seen Sarah shrink and run from another person’s well-meant caress. Her hand on Sarah’s stiff shoulder became very still. They looked at one another. A sick depression came upon Jeanie, a premonition of horror. All very well to offer so genially to disperse poor little Sarah’s worry! What if it should prove undispersable, a horror capable of enveloping Jeanie and Cleedons and all Handleston in its foul mist?
“Oh Sarah,” uttered Jeanie. “Was that rifle Marjorie Dasent’s?”
It did not need Sarah’s too quick, too violent denial, the terrified contraction of her pupils, to tell Jeanie that indeed it was. They stood in silence, looking at one another. Jeanie recalled Marjorie’s collapse at the inquest, the obvious fear that had looked out of her eyes at Jeanie over the lighting of a cigarette, T
amsin’s story of her scene with Molyneux. Oh, the thing was horrible, and going to be worse! In the midst of her horror Jeanie noted it as an odd thing that she felt no particular moral revulsion from Marjorie Dasent now that she saw her as a murderess. She thought of her with the mixture of pity, aversion and embarrassment with which a healthy person may contemplate one hideously ill.
“She’ll be hanged!”
It was Sarah who spoke, suddenly abandoning pretence in a dry whisper soft as the beating of a moth’s wing.
“How did you know?”
“I saw her, Jeanie,” said the child in a hoarse whisper.
“You can’t have done, dear! You were with me in the hay-loft!”
“It was afterwards,” uttered Sarah, still in that ghostly whisper. “When you were with Aunt Agnes in the lane. I went to fetch some water, and I couldn’t find a bucket. You remember. I went behind the barn into the orchard to fetch the chicken’s basin. And I saw Marjorie crossing the orchard. She had a gun. She came from where the lambing-shed is. She looked awful. I saw her look at where Uncle Robert was. She just looked at him. She looked awful. And then she went out quickly through the gap. She didn’t see me. She seemed to look round, and then I saw her stoop down. And when she stood up, she had no gun. She’d buried it under the culvert. She looked so awful, Jeanie! But she’d just done a murder, so of course—and she went away. Oh Jeanie, Jeanie! She’ll be hanged, if they find out, won’t she?”
The two walked slowly on.
“Do you think the police will know it’s Marjorie’s?” asked Sarah fearfully.
“I’m afraid they’ll easily find out. What made you interfere, my dear?”
“I couldn’t just let them find it! And they were dragging the pond. They were looking everywhere; I knew they’d find it soon! I thought I’d hide it in a better place. Grim’s Grave. I thought it might be safe there. If I prayed to Grim—”
“My dear kiddie!”
“Well!”
“Oh well, it’s natural, I suppose! I wonder,” speculated Jeanie, “how many things are buried there on top of Grim? If it occurred to you so easily, you won’t have been the first to think of it in all these centuries!”
Chapter Fourteen
BIRD-BOLTS
Agnes was in the little panelled parlour, and alone, for once, when Jeanie arrived at Cleedons. A glittering tea-equipage fit for a reception stood on the low table beside her, with enough untouched bread and butter, cakes and little sandwiches to feed a party. The crimson curtains were drawn to shut out the dusk.
“Alone for once, Agnes?” asked Jeanie a little timidly, not quite certain of her welcome, for she had come uninvited.
A rueful expression came over Agnes’s face.
“You may well say ‘for once’!” she murmured. “What with policemen and relations and the doctor, I get no peace. Dr. Hall’s so determined that I ought to be ill that he calls every day—to make me so, I suppose. And as for Tamsin Wills! Really, Jeanie, I don’t know what to do about that girl! She fusses over me and follows me about till I’m nearly crazy. What have I done to arouse all this horrible devotion? Really, it’s like being a schoolmistress again.”
Jeanie winced, for there had been a time when Agnes had roused her devotion, and she had not thought, then, that Agnes found it horrible.
“We had a fearful row here about ten minutes ago. Tamsin flung off out of the house. Really, Jeanie, I don’t know what’s the matter with her! She’ll have to go. She’s been getting more and more peculiar ever since she made that dead set at Mr. Fone, and he had to show her so plainly he didn’t like her.”
“Mr. Fone! I wouldn’t have thought Tamsin was exactly in love with Mr. Fone!” said Jeanie, a trifle uncomfortably, for there had been real malice in Agnes’s tone.
“Of course not, now! She hates him, no doubt. Because he didn’t agree with her about their being soulmates. I believe he said they were on quite different spirals or something.”
Jeanie laughed.
“I believe you’re just making that up!”
Agnes smiled, taking the accusation as a tribute to her powers of entertainment.
“She’ll have to go. I’ve had enough of it,” said she, stretching a little in her low chair and yawning delicately, like a lazy cat. “We had that awful Peel woman here this afternoon. Tamsin saw her. That’s really what started the row. Naturally, Tamsin’s very anxious that Sarah shan’t go back to her mother and leave Tamsin out of a job. But after all, as I told her, a mother has the first claim on her own child.”
“Oh, surely,” said Jeanie uneasily, “if you’re Sarah’s guardian, Agnes, you wouldn’t—”
A fretful look came at once, at this hint of criticism, to Agnes’s face.
“Of course I wouldn’t, but I wanted to annoy Tamsin, because I’m sick of her bullying and fussing, and I won’t have her dictating to me. Of course, if I’m Sarah’s guardian I’ll carry out Robert’s wishes. I don’t like children, and Sarah doesn’t like me, but of course I do as Robert wanted. But it’s no pleasure to me to have Sarah here; it’s a duty, and I wish somebody could convince Mrs. Peel of it. I shall keep the child simply, simply because Robert wished it!” said Agnes, searching around among her cushions for a handkerchief.
“I’m sorry, Agnes,” said Jeanie penitently.
“Oh, it’s not you, Jeanie. It’s Tamsin. She’s really quite intolerable!”
“Why not send her away?”
“I’d like to, only well, what could I do with Sarah? All the bother of finding another tutor or deciding on a school. I really feel I haven’t the strength to make any changes just yet.”
Agnes blew her nose and, standing up, poked a log down in the fire with the toe of her shoe. She looked very frail standing there in the firelight in her long black gown, and Jeanie looked at her with a half-unwilling admiration. A beautiful dress: and why should not a dress of mourning be beautiful? Must death be surrounded everywhere with ugliness? Thin lips, drooping at present, beautifully touched with artificial colour: and why not? Thin, fine-cut eyelids, with nature’s somewhat earthy shadows beautifully transformed with mascara to a frail violet: and again, why not? Well, it was only four days since poor Mr. Molyneux’s death: how could so newly-widowed a wife as Agnes find heart for that elaborate study of her own appearance?
“Tamsin didn’t like Robert,” said Agnes suddenly. “And of course he couldn’t endure her, really. She wasn’t his sort of girl. And lately he’d begun to think she wasn’t up to her job. I think he was wrong there. Tamsin’s very well qualified, and not at all a bad teacher. Only of course Sarah’s never liked her, and that weighed a lot with Robert. He was thinking of getting rid of her, I know. And she knew it, of course. Anyhow, she didn’t like him. She was jealous of him, too—you know, Jeanie, what extraordinary notions these repressed kind of girls like Tamsin can get in their heads! Only I didn’t realise till lately how abnormal she was. She’s getting worse, I suppose. Really, I don’t think she’s quite sane!”
Agnes’s voice went on in a low peevish tone, with little fretful sighs. Evidently, Tamsin had behaved very badly that afternoon.
“Oh Agnes, why not tell her to go, if it worries you so?”
Agnes’s eyes turned, wide and dark, upon Jeanie’s face. She said with a little sob:
“I used not to mind her disliking Robert. But now— it seems too horrible! Too horrible, that she shouldn’t like him, and he’s dead! Oh Jeanie!”
She half-turned, and let her face sink for a second upon Jeanie’s shoulder.
“When we had that row this afternoon—when she was so unbearable—I felt quite ashamed of the suspicions that came into my head. But I can’t get rid of them! I keep thinking, Tamsin was in the Tower room. Tamsin could have—oh no! No!”
“But Agnes, it wasn’t from the Tower that the shot came. It was from the other side of the orchard.”
“Who says so? That lunatic William Fone! Who would take any notice of him?” asked Agnes scornfully.
“But there’s no reason why he shouldn’t be speaking the truth, Agnes, even if he is a lunatic! Unless of course he shot Mr. Molyneux himself.”
Agnes raised wide, frightened eyes from Jeanie’s shoulder. She looked paper-pale and fragile in the firelight.
“Tamsin tried to make us think he did,” she uttered slowly. “Don’t you remember? Right at the beginning, Tamsin tried to make us suspect Mr. Fone? Oh Jeanie! Was it because she had done it herself? Did she know how easily it could be done from one of the windows in the Tower?”
They looked at one another. Jeanie felt quite a little chill of horror. What more likely than that crime should flower in the soil of malice? And had not Jeanie herself thought Tamsin Wills a very spring of malice? Then her common sense reasserted itself.
“I don’t think you need torture yourself with that suspicion, Agnes. The truth’s bad enough. The police have found a rifle that was hidden in the orchard-ditch.”
“Do you mean, they know who did it?”
“No, they don’t know, but—”
But Agnes, when Jeanie mentioned Marjorie Dasent’s name, looked first a little contemptuous, then amused, and then, drying her eyes, laughed the whole idea to scorn.
“Marjorie! Oh no! She hasn’t enough imagination even to think of—oh no! It’s absurd! I don’t care how many rifles of hers they’ve found! Somebody else must have been using it!”
“But Sarah said—”
“Sarah! Now, she’s got too much imagination. She probably made up the whole thing. She’s a little romancer, that child, Jeanie!”
“I dare say. But there’s a difference between romancing and—”
“No, there isn’t. Look at that mother of hers! Hardly knows what she’s saying half the time!”
“Yes, but—”
“Oh, no, Jeanie! Marjorie Dasent! It’s ridiculous! She simply hasn’t got it in her! But Tamsin—”
Agnes shuddered.
“Oh, I suppose I’m an imaginative fool myself! Sarah and I are a pair, aren’t we?”
She sank into her low chair again, and leaning her elbows on her knees looked, as if for comfort, into the roaring fire. She loved heat, and shut windows and drawn curtains, and scented rooms, and cushions. She was like a sleek, thin cat in her tastes and her delicate ways. Jeanie, who was not, was beginning to feel oppressed in this hot-house atmosphere. She unbuttoned her knitted jacket.
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