“What was she like, this Valentine Frazer?”
“Like? Oh, like you’d expect. A vulgar, noisy kind or creature. The sort of person you can see and hear from miles away. If she were shopping in the village everyone knew it. Used to go and drink port in the saloon bar at the ‘White Lion.’ That’s how she met her painter, I suppose.”
“Was she good-looking?”
Tamsin turned a chill shiver into an ostentatious shudder of aversion.
“If you like chemical golden hair and lots of pink paint!”
“But she was young?”
“Oh no, nearly forty, I should think. She was good- looking, I suppose,” admitted Tamsin grudgingly. “Or what most people would call good-looking, when she took the trouble. She was supposed to have been some low-class kind of actress and she just looked it and behaved like it. A chorus-girl, as people used to say, only it sounds rather old-fashioned now.”
“She was popular, was she, in the village?”
Tamsin laughed ill-naturedly.
“You can’t live in sin, and be popular, in a village,” said she. “But she had lots of money, Heaven knows how she got it, and spent it at the village shops and was friendly to everyone in a noisy kind of way, so she was quite decently treated. To her face.”
“I see. Good Heavens! I wonder what Harmless Hubert’s done with her!”
“Harmless Hubert?”
“Hubert Southey. I know him a bit. He taught at the Art School I went to.”
“Oh, the painter she went off with! Probably murdered her by now, I should think. But he was very much smitten at the time.”
“Smitten! How marvellous, and how very, very odd, to think of Harmless Hubert being smitten!”
“He painted her sitting in a field, with half the village kids looking on,” said Tamsin. “You can imagine the chatter! I don’t think Agnes need have made herself unhappy. Obviously it wasn’t Mr. Molyneux, it was this painter Southey, who was the favoured one. But being a married woman, you see, and dependent, she did make herself unhappy.”
“I don’t think you can say that. I don’t see that there’s any reason to suppose that there was anything at all between Mr. Molyneux and this woman, and I do think, Tamsin, you ought not to suggest such a thing without more to go on,” said Jeanie uneasily. Tamsin stiffened again, and spoke coldly.
“There was an awful quarrel between Mr. Molyneux and Hugh Barchard, anyway. I do know that.”
“But that was about the money Mr. Molyneux lent Barchard! Peter Johnson told me.”
Tamsin shrugged her shoulders.
“I’m afraid I’m not so pure-minded as you are.”
“I’m afraid you’re not.”
They walked on in silence, but Tamsin could not long restrain herself from self-justification.
“All I know is, Agnes used often to go down to Yew Tree Cottage, although officially, of course, she didn’t even know the woman. And she was always nervous and wretched when she came back. In fact, she seemed nervous and wretched most of the time the Frazer woman was here. She’s been a different person since. It just shows you—”
"It shows me, anyway,” said Jeanie, smiling, trying to make amends, “that the former tenant of my cottage must have been a formidable woman.”
“Formidable! Oh no! Just handsome in a very vulgar kind of way, and loud and noisy, and immoral and impertinent!”
“I should think the average English matron would find that a bit formidable,” said Jeanie. “And she wore red gloves, didn’t she? Because Mrs. Barchard said so. And a pearl necklace from Woolworth’s.”
They were upon the door-step of Cleedons and Tamsin had her hand outstretched towards the bell when, perceiving what Jeanie had in her hand, she paused with an exclamation:
“Those! Let me look!”
“Why, have you seen them before?”
In the light over the door Tamsin peered at the broken string of beads, held them up and examined carefully the brilliant clasp.
“Of course! Where did you find them? Have you shown them to Agnes? They’re hers.”
“Whose?”
“Agnes’s.”
Oh no, because—”
“Oh yes! I couldn’t mistake them. The clasp was specially designed for her. And I remember the way the safety catch had got bent. Where on earth did you find them?”
Jeanie looked incredulously at Tamsin.
“But I showed them to Agnes, and she didn’t say they were hers! Surely she wasn’t shy of saying to me that she wore artificial pearls!”
“Artificial pearls!” echoed Tamsin. “They’re not artificial! That string cost fourteen hundred pounds!”
“What!”
“It did. Mr. Molyneux bought it cheap, through a friend, too. Agnes lost it, about three years ago, and there was a fearful to-do. Is that all you found?”
“But Tamsin! I tell you Agnes saw them, and she didn’t say they were hers!”
“I can’t help that. They are.”
“But how extraordinary! I’ll ask her! I can’t possibly keep them if they’re as valuable as that, even for a day or two!”
“Oh no!” cried Tamsin. “Don’t tell her I said they were hers! Perhaps I oughtn’t to have said anything! She’ll be furious with me! And everything seems to be going wrong between me and Agnes! Give me a chance to make it up with her!”
The girl’s distress was so genuine, her nerves so obviously unstrung, the happenings of this queer evening so conducive to folly, that Jeanie agreed. After all, if Agnes had denied knowledge of the pearls before, she would do so again. What could have been her motive?
Chapter Sixteen
THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY IN RED GLOVES
“Do you know a good jeweller in Gloucester, Mr. Fone? I want some pearls valued.”
“I should imagine a pawnbroker’s would be a suitable place. We must look out for the sign of the three golden balls. The human love of adornment,” continued Mr. Fone thoughtfully, “has led to many curious proceedings, but to none more curious than the wearing around the female neck of strings of morbid growths from the bodies of oysters.”
Jeanie laughed, but Mr. Fone seemed perfectly serious.
“I am told that the inducing of morbid growths in unfortunate oysters is quite a profitable industry among the Japanese. In my view it is not an occupation worthy of man.”
They were sitting in state under a fur rug in the back of Mr. Fone’s old touring car. A landscape of Jeanie’s had been accepted for an exhibition in the Guildhall of paintings by Gloucestershire artists, and Jeanie had gladly accepted Mr. Fone’s offer to drive her in to the private view. He had some business in Gloucester, he said, and would drop her and Peter at the Guildhall.
Peter was at the wheel. He was gayer than Jeanie had known him since before Molyneux’s death. He looked serene and happy, like a seaman in his boat or a painter before his canvas.
“I too, by the way, have some shopping to do in Gloucester,” said Mr. Fone. “I want to buy a pair of sighting staves, such as Boy Scouts carry about with them. Or, if these aren’t procurable, broom-handles would do, I dare say.”
“Staves?” echoed Jeanie, with vague thoughts of cowled pilgrims or of medieval gentlemen smiting one another over the head in single combat.
“Yes. Such as surveyors use, and such as were used by the early inhabitants of these islands to make those straight roads afterwards metalled by the Roman invaders. I have been trying to get the local antiquarians interested in the subject of early British trackways. But there is nothing more stubborn than an antiquarian asked to reconsider his notions. Sir Henry Blundell, especially, appears to suffer from a kind of Romanophilia that amounts to a mania. He appears to think that these islands hardly existed before the Romans set their heavy feet on them. No argument, however strong, would ever convince Sir Henry that the Romans were a poor, unimaginative, material-minded, slavish race of men, inferior in both physique and spirit to the people they conquered, superior in only two things—mechanical skill and
the discipline of the trained slave. I am hoping to give a demonstration of the theory of the old straight track one day soon to some of the Field Club members. If you are interested in the subject, I hope you will join us. I don’t expect to convert Sir Henry Blundell from his worship of Roman militarism, but if I induce a few of our members to prefer the culture of our own early ancestors to that of our dull-souled invaders, I shall have done something.”
It depressed Jeanie, but after what Tamsin had said it did not surprise her, to hear that her half-string of pearls was worth between four and five hundred pounds. The man behind the counter showed a certain curiosity as to the whereabouts of the other half.
“For, of course,” said he, “the whole string, if well matched, would be worth much more than twice that.”
“I see. I’m afraid I haven’t got the other half.”
A pity, remarked the jeweller, in a voice interrogative with curiosity. Jeanie did not attempt to satisfy it. Her own mind seemed starred all over with interrogation-marks, so starred that she could not think clearly enough to answer anybody else’s questions.
“What’s the matter?” asked Peter, looking at her quite anxiously as she reached the street where he was waiting for her. “You look all kind of dazed, Jeanie. Pearls only Woolworth’s, after all?”
Jeanie shook her head.
“No, they’re worth five hundred pounds.”
“Five hundred pounds! Then why the tragedy effect, Jeanie? Did you hope they’d be worth more?”
“No, I hoped they wouldn’t be worth anything. They’re not mine. They’re some that were found in my cottage. Tamsin says they belong to Agnes. Agnes doesn’t say they belong to her. I don’t know how they got in my cottage. It’s all very complicated.”
“Agnes did lose a string of pearls about three years ago,” said Peter. “I remember. Mr. Molyneux was rather annoyed about it, because he hadn’t bought them long, and the insurance people were rather sticky about paying up.”
“But Agnes doesn’t say they’re hers. Tamsin says they’re hers.”
Peter looked in a somewhat puzzled manner at Jeanie’s grave face, and laughed.
“You’d better come and have some lunch with me somewhere and we’ll try to solve the problem, Jeanie. It sounds like the beginning of a brain-twister out of the Week-End Agony Book.”
They rejected several tea-shops of varying allure, and settled themselves in the sombre dining-room of an old-fashioned hotel, where the service was slow and the food conscientiously boiled, but where they were at least free from hustle, noise and the close propinquity of other lunchers. Over a plate of brown and glutinous soup, Jeanie told Peter about Agatos’s finding of the broken string of pearls, about Agnes’s surprise and hesitation when she had seen them, and Tamsin’s positiveness as to their ownership.
“It doesn’t sound much like Agnes to repudiate a five-hundred-pound string of pearls,” commented Peter a little grimly, when she had finished.
“No, I know. And yet, Peter, I believe they are hers, or she knew something about them, anyway. She behaved so oddly.”
“And Tamsin says, does she, that Agnes was acquainted with the lady who used to live at your cottage? I didn’t know that, but she may have been.”
“Tamsin says Agnes went to see her several times.”
“Then she must have left her pearls there. Or had them stolen there. Or given them away to Barchard’s lady.”
“Not very likely, is it?”
“Or perhaps,” said Peter thoughtfully, crumbling bread into his soup in a vulgar manner, “it was some nefarious scheme for collecting the insurance money. Agnes lent the pearls to this Miss Frazer, and—”
“Oh, surely Agnes wouldn’t do that,” murmured Jeanie, pained.
Peter was expressively silent.
“Besides,” said Jeanie, “one’d have to know a person awfully well before one would take her as a partner in a—a swindle, wouldn’t one? No that’s impossible, Peter. But I should like to know Agnes’s pearls got to Yew Tree Cottage.”
“Better find Miss Valentine Frazer and ask her.”
“I wonder where she is. I wonder if one could track her down. I wonder whether one could ask Hubert Southey if he knows her whereabouts.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know,” said Jeanie, smiling slightly. “Hubert Southey is such a very proper little man. Oh, Peter!”
“What is it?” he asked anxiously. “This fish?”
“No, no, that’s all right. It’s only—oh, I wish, I wish I knew who killed Mr. Molyneux.”
Peter said:
“I didn’t, Jeanie. And I believe even the idiot police are beginning to realise that. I don’t think I’m their pet suspect any more. Young Sarah told me about—”
“Oh dear, I’d managed to forget Marjorie Dasent for a whole hour.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Not your fault. I started this conversation. Only—it is horrible, isn’t it, to think of evidence like that against a girl one knows?”
“Very. But, candidly, it’s not half so horrible as evidence like that against oneself,” replied Peter grimly. “Probably she didn’t do it any more than I did. But it’ll give old Finister something to think about for a day or two. Did you notice how I passed that bobby in the street just now, Jeanie? Almost without quivering. You don’t know what it means, to be able to pass a bobby without a quiver.”
“Do you really think Marjorie didn’t do it, Peter?”
Peter put a lot of salt thoughtfully on his well-boiled fish.
“I shouldn’t have thought she had it in her. But one never knows.”
“I think she must have done. She had a rifle, she was in the orchard. Sarah saw her, you know. And she had a motive, of a kind.”
“Yes. All that’s against her. Anything in her favour?”
Jeanie thought.
“Only that Agnes, who knows her fairly well, I suppose, says she can’t have done it, she hasn’t got it in her, and nothing will induce Agnes to believe she did it. Agnes seemed to think—”
Peter looked up sharply.
“Yes?”
“Well—that Tamsin—but of course it’s absurd!”
“Why? Tamsin’s a very erratic type of young woman, if you ask me. And Mr. Molyneux didn’t like her at all and intended to sack her, and she knew it. And being Sarah’s governess is a good well-paid job, and Tamsin isn’t exactly the sort of girl who falls easily into good jobs. And she’s devoted to Agnes and would hate to leave her. And she was stupidly jealous of Molyneux; anybody could see that. And she was in the Tower room overlooking the orchard when Robert Molyneux was shot.”
“Yes,” agreed Jeanie. “All that’s against her. But Mr. Molyneux can’t have been killed by a shot from the lower Tower window, and that’s in her favour.”
“Who says so? Only Fone! Nobody else professes to know which way Mr. Molyneux was facing when he died. Nobody else saw him die. Perhaps Mr. Fone’s mistaken.”
“Or perhaps,” said Jeanie, with a certain malice, for Peter had an admiration for Mr. Fone, and she hoped to make him rise, “Mr. Fone shot Mr. Molyneux himself. Why not?” she went on quickly, as Peter frowned and made a little movement of protest. “Mr. Fone was in the Tower room overlooking the orchard when Mr. Molyneux was shot. Mr. Fone had written a letter to Mr. Molyneux which Tamsin described as threatening— oh, not threatening him with death, more a sort of gipsy’s curse affair, as far as I could gather. Mr. Fone was determined the tumulus shouldn’t be opened if he could help it, and really seems to have believed hell would be let loose if it were! Also, by his own account he behaved very oddly in going straight home after he saw poor Mr. Molyneux die, without doing anything to help him. Well? All that’s against him. What’s in his favour?”
Peter smiled, helping himself to a drowned potato.
“Merely that one can’t imagine him telling a lie about such an exploit. If he’d been mad enough to think that the end of saving the tumulus justi
fied the means of killing Robert Molyneux, he’d have said so. He’s not like ordinary men. Barchard’s right there.”
“Ah! Barchard! No, no potatoes, thank you. What about Barchard? He had a motive. He owed Mr. Molyneux two hundred pounds.”
“And where was he at the crucial moment?
Jeanie’s face fell.
“No good. He was mending leads on the roof at Cole Harbour. He couldn’t even have seen Robert Molyneux from there, all the farm buildings are between Cole Harbour and the Cleedons orchard. Besides it’s the wrong side. Mr. Molyneux was shot from the northwest and Cole Harbour’s more or less south-east.”
“But that’s only according to Fone!” Peter reminded her.
“I know, but unless we’re to believe Mr. Fone did the murder himself, surely we must accept his word,” said Jeanie a little warmly.
“No, he may have been mistaken.”
“I don’t see how. He says Mr. Molyneux looked round towards Cleedons just before he was shot. He says he saw his face. You can’t be mistaken about a thing like that.”
“Perhaps not,” said Peter in a rather unconvinced tone. “Are you sure Barchard was on the Cole Harbour roof?”
“Yes. Dr. Hall saw him when he went to fetch his Archaeologia.”
“Well, now, what about Dr. Hall?”
Jeanie laughed.
“Well, of course Mr. Molyneux didn’t like doctors, did he? But no, Peter. I think we can leave Dr. Hall out of it. No motive.”
“Any other member of the Field Club behave in a suspicious manner?”
“Not as far as I know.”
Jeanie remembered Tamsin’s innuendoes about Sir Henry Blundell, but firmly suppressed them. They were too absurd!
There were already quite a lot of people wandering pensively around the sky-lit gallery when they entered. These wore, for the most part, the peculiarly subdued, pale and dejected look of people at picture-shows, who move as if the top-light intimidates them, as well it may. The pictures were ordinary, and Jeanie could sympathise with Peter’s remark when they had been half round the gallery.
“Oh, Jeanie, how I do long for a few triangles!”
Let Him Lie Page 14