It was the sound of laughter that began my awakening to the present. Three people were coming towards us across the meadows from the direction of the sea. At first I could see only flashes of colour through a hedge then, as they scrambled between the fuchsias into the field where we were standing, I could distinguish one from another; they were Kinky Myles, her husband, and my cousin Juliet. They waved when they saw me.
“Yoo hoo,” Juliet called.
It was a big field, so they kept disappearing and reappearing from behind the winds of hay as they approached along the field’s edge, but the sound of their voices and merry laughter was with us all the time. I found myself getting increasingly angry with them — though they could hardly be expected to know the circumstances — especially since they seized on the opportunity of each reappearance to call out some would-be merry quip each one of which felt like a fork jabbed into my own heart.
“Now that you’re decent again,” Juliet shouted from about the distance of three cricket pitches away, “you might give Kinky back her wrap.”
I dislike being addressed by loudspeaker at any time; in the context this obscene din roused me to fury. I started towards the three new-comers to shut them up and turn them back, but Barney stopped me with a look.
“Never mind,” he said. “Let them come.”
I subsided, though I had been finally jerked out of the numbness of grief; thereafter, even if I felt more keenly, I at least knew what was going on around me. We stood grouped about the body — the hay-makers, Perrot, the remaining guard, Barney and I — and watched and waited. My anger against the three who came blundering towards us gradually changed to a kind of sympathy. It was horrible, almost sadistic, to let them come without warning but Barney’s shock had been a hundredfold greater than theirs could be; on this afternoon I was not going to say him nay. Perrot, I noticed, was looking anxiously at his employer; the guard too — it was the dark one with the queer sense of humour — was looking at Barney but completely without expression.
“Hallo!” Myles exclaimed, as they came within clearer sight of us. “You’ve had a bit of a fire. Not too much damage, though, by the look of it.”
“A fire. Oh, what a pity we didn’t get here a bit sooner.” Juliet was bubbling over with good spirits. “We could have helped to put it out.” She sounded as if she were forcing herself to make up for her sourness of the morning.
“Why there’s my old dressing-gown,” Kinky said. “What’s that under ——” She stopped.
All three stopped, frozen as we had been frozen. Automatically my gaze followed theirs to the thing under the baby-blue towelling. One of Stella’s Italian sandals, untouched by the fire, was showing under the end of the covering. No one said anything. There was no need. In the silence I could hear a car coming up the avenue and a minute or two later the banging of its doors after it had arrived at the house, then there was nothing to be heard but the murmur of the sea and the occasional wail of a scavenging gull. Myles took his unlighted pipe from his mouth and put it in his pocket.
It was Juliet who finally broke our spell-bound stillness. She began to heave as a dog heaves after it has swallowed grass, then she steadied herself against the nearest wind and vomited into the stubble.
I am afraid that my reaction was to let her get on with it and to hope that the Myleses would take her and themselves away, but they only stared at her blankly. Barney, however, had to do something about it; perhaps his over-active conscience was pricking him for not having let me turn the girls back before they had seen so much. He got a glass from the picnic-basket, which had not suffered in the fire, poured something into it and brought it to Juliet.
“Try to get down some of this,” he said as soothingly as if he were talking to a baby.
She took the glass, stared at him for a moment, then buried her face in the wind.
While I was watching her, the Civic Guard sergeant whom I had met at the previous evening’s fire came almost unnoticed into our midst. Even under the stress of the time it came into my mind to hope that there was no third such meeting in store for us.
“This is a terrible business, sir,” he said to Barney. “God help you to bear it.”
“He let it happen, Sergeant.” Barney took his handkerchief half-way out of his pocket then, finding the magnifying glass — if that is what the thing was — still wrapped in the rather soggy bit of linen, he pushed it back in again and mopped his face with his sleeve. “I suppose it’s His will.”
The sergeant had taken off his cap; he was looking at the covered body in a way that was half human, half professional. After a few seconds he resumed his headgear and a manner that was wholly official. “I’ve been talking to the chief on the radio,” he said. “I passed on to him what Guard Fox reported to me about this terrible thing.” He jerked his head in the direction of the red-haired guard who had left us and had returned with him. “The chief has decided to call in assistance from the Detective Branch at The Castle. In the light of that I don’t propose to bother anyone unduly till the officers from Dublin have got here to-night, or to-morrow morning maybe. I take it everyone here will be available?”
There was a complete absence of reaction from us all, unless a change in the tempo of Juliet’s dry retching could be construed as an answer. The sergeant looked at me and cleared his throat.
“Have you made any plans for leaving us, sir?” he inquired.
I shook my head. “No plans at all,” I said.
“If you do, I’ll be obliged if you’ll let me know. The gentlemen from Dublin will no doubt be glad to have a word with you.”
No doubt, I thought; it was indeed the first time that I had begun to consider the matter in this light. I did not say anything. The sergeant glanced at Juliet, the other non-resident, but appeared at once to dismiss her as one who would have neither the strength nor the stomach to wield a murderous hay-fork; he went on to speak in a low voice to the Myleses.
“We’re only in the way here,” said Barney. “We may as well get back. Follow us when you’re ready, Myles, if you want to. I’ll have a man drive you back to your car.”
He took a last look at the shrouded body of his wife and led the way towards the house.
It was over an hour later that Mrs. Kealey recovered sufficiently from her lamentations for her lost mistress to give me back my jacket, now sponged and pressed and dry — and it was only then, too, that I remembered Grace’s letter. I found the envelope, which I had opened at the Hazard Arms and from which I had extracted the contents only to thrust them back into my pocket when the telephone bell rang, but I could not find the letter. I searched each pocket again and again but without success.
There was no letter.
CHAPTER VII
The detectives from Dublin reached the Civic Guard station at Rossderg at dusk and immediately decided that there was no point in looking over the scene of the crime before daylight on the following morning; presumably they spent the early hours of the night in studying reports from the local men and getting themselves generally in the picture. At any rate they had the civility to let us know — by the medium of the ubiquitous sergeant — that they would call at Hazard Point House at 10.0 a.m., for the purpose of interviewing its occupants; there was therefore nothing to prevent us from going to bed — nothing except our thoughts.
Stella’s body had been taken away for examination and an unnatural quiet had settled upon the house; even the dogs seemed to feel that they must not bark. The servants and the men who worked about the place looked at me oddly when we met then cast down their eyes when they saw that I had caught them looking; it was no comfort to me to observe that they treated Barney in the same way. Uniformed guards patrolled the grounds and were to be found lurking in the most unlikely spots but whether they were there for our protection or for the protection of others from us, from one of us, from either Barney or from me, was not clear. All this was irritating but it was not what mattered: Stella was dead — and I could not help think
ing that if it had not been for what she and I had done together she would not have died. If I had not provided the motive, I had given the opportunity, I had somehow fitted my movements and hers into a chain of cause and effect that had linked her to a maniac and brought her to her death; so much at least, I felt, must be obvious to everyone. None of this, however, was what mattered. Stella was dead.
The news spread with an astonishing rapidity. This is always the case in rural Ireland, yet it never fails to astonish people like me who have made their life in cities and return only occasionally to their native soil. Among the Indians of the American West a similar phenomenon was observed but they may have done it with mirrors or smoke-signals; in our case I can suggest no explanation but telepathy. Be that as it may, within half a dozen hours of the discovery of Stella’s dead body as many old friends of the Hazard family had called to tender their sympathy. These were not people of the rather raffish sort who had attended the Myles’s party but pillars of the county who were probably sufficiently old-fashioned faintly to have disapproved of Barney’s marriage to an actress, though I cannot think that many of them can have been able to resist Stella’s liveliness and charm. None of the visitors, however, stayed for more than a few minutes, so that it was left to Frankie Marr — a friend of much more recent date — to make a third that evening over the brandy in Barney’s huge study.
We sat without lights, for we were not going to read or play cards or do anything else that called for them and it was perhaps pleasanter for us not to be able to see each other’s expressions too plainly. At first we could measure time by the length of the shadow cast by the headland hills till the last glint of the sunset had gone and the late summer night showed itself to be less dark than the dusk which had preceded it. Beyond the windows the black figure of a guard crossing the lawn was clearly discernible, if not identifiable as a particular man, while in the room our faces were a paler blur against the background of books and polished wood. It was the missing face, however, that was most disturbingly with us; the house was more full of Stella’s presence than it had ever been in her life — and hers was not a personality that went unremarked.
“What had she ever done to him?” demanded Barney low-voiced, putting an end to a sigh-punctuated silence. “Why did he have to kill her?”
There was little use in asking us; we did not have the answer — but Marr attempted it.
“If Scanlon killed her, he’s a maniac — he doesn’t need a reason to kill.”
“If!” Barney fastened on to the conjunction in something approaching his old terrier-like way. “If Scanlon didn’t do it, who did? Answer me that!”
“You’re way ahead of me, Barney.” Marr gave another of the deep sighs that had formed such a large part of our conversation during the evening. “I’m not putting up any candidate. But Scanlon was elected because, as a notoriously jealous husband, he had a reason for killing his wife, an old-fashioned out-of-vogue reason but a reason. He would not have had the same sort of compelling reason to kill Stella, so — if he killed both Elly Scanlon and Stella — it’s a cinch that he’s a maniac. But, if they were both killed by a maniac, there’s nothing left to suggest that Scanlon was the murderer.”
“But damn it all, Frank, don’t you see ——” Barney started explosively but went off into spluttering misfire as the simple logic came to grips with his own entrenched opinions, then he thought in silence for a little and while he thought he refilled our glasses with brandy. “You’re suggesting,” he resumed more quietly, “that we have to look for one maniac or for two rational individuals with unconnected reasonable motives?”
“We haven’t got to look for anybody. That sort of thing is much better left to the professionals.”
“Tchah!” Barney dismissed what he regarded as a side-issue. “Don’t you think that two separate murderers using exactly the same method within twenty-four hours in a little place like this is too much of a coincidence?”
“It seems so, but one could have copied the other. Two men out of so few having the will and the nerve for murder within one day is an even odder coincidence. But you’ve forgotten the third.”
“The third what?”
“Coincidence. The witchcraft scena. The doll that had pins stuck in it and then was burnt.”
“By God, I had forgotten it. The doll that was christened something like Elly.” In spite of the dimness I could see Barney’s eyes fixed on me, or perhaps I just felt them. “What was the name, Standish?”
“I didn’t hear it,” I said. “I told you.”
It was at that moment that the sergeant arrived to let us know that our vigil might end, that our statements would not be required till the morning. The lights were switched on for his benefit and we blinked at him like creatures unaccustomed to so much brightness. The tide of Armagnac in the bottle was at a low ebb, though I scarcely felt that I had been drinking. Barney and Marr, too, seemed sober as any judges but rather gave the impression of having been wakened from sleep — from one nightmare, perhaps, only to be plunged into another. For some reason they both looked, and I felt, vaguely guilty.
“It’s Superintendent Duffy that will be coming out in the morning,” the sergeant told us, “a man with a great reputation and a gentleman that it’s a pleasure to work with.”
Barney eyed the sad bottle and fetched another from a cupboard under the book-shelves. “Have a drink with us, Sergeant,” he invited. “There’s whisky, if you prefer it.”
“I won’t, sir, if you’ll forgive me. Thank you all the same. I have a lot of work before me this night.” He prepared to go but was stopped by a question from Barney.
“Sergeant — you remember the witchcraft party I told you about?”
“I do, sir.”
“Find out anything about it?”
“I made inquiries, and my report on the matter is in front of Superintendent Duffy this minute. My own view is that the incident was no more than a game, a nasty game but no more than a game. It was what you might call coincidental to the ——” He sought for a suitable word and finally selected — “tragedies. I think I might tell you, gentlemen, though it hasn’t been released to the Press yet, that we have a man at the station who might be able to help us.” The sergeant moved to the door before turning to say — “Leastways, if he doesn’t, he may find himself charged with being an accessory after the fact,” with which masterly exit-line he left us.
We all stared after him. Barney leapt to his feet.
“I’m going in to the station now,” he said.
“Hold your horses,” Marr said. “The night’s young.”
“How dare he? How dare he walk out of here after only telling me half of a matter that concerns me more than anyone else in the world? What the hell do we pay rates and taxes for? To be told serial stories?”
“He told us as much as he could.”
“Then it was either too much or too little. I’m going to get to the bottom of this. I’m getting a car out and going to the station. Coming?”
“There’s plenty of time.” The easy comfortable voice was in sharp contrast with the haggard look on Marr’s face. He removed the cork from the fresh bottle of Armagnac and filled Barney’s glass. “Have a drink first,” he advised.
Barney lifted the glass automatically to his lips. He was about to throw the contents back against his tonsils, as if the stuff were vodka, when he noticed that our glasses were empty; he paused to refill them for us, then sat down to drink with us.
“It’s no good.” He sighed as if the action of lowering himself into his chair had returned his spirits to the depths. “Nothing that I can do, nothing that I can find out, will bring her back.”
“You’ll have to get in touch with her relatives,” said Marr practically. “She did have some, I suppose?”
“Her parents are dead. I suppose it’s all right to say thank God. I’d hate to have to break it to them. There’s only an aunt in Tunbridge Wells.”
“And a sister,” I a
mended unguardedly.
“A sister?”
“Yes.”
“She didn’t tell me she had a sister.”
“I don’t think she liked her very much.”
“What nonsense. One doesn’t like or dislike one’s sisters, one just has them.”
“It was the sister’s husband she disliked really, I think. She never spoke of her.”
“Why did she tell you about her then?”
“She didn’t. I just happened to see them together somewhere.”
“I see. Standish knew my wife long before I did,” Barney proceeded somewhat unnecessarily to explain to Marr. “All the same I can’t see why in nearly three years of married life she didn’t tell me she had a sister.”
“Probably thought you weren’t interested,” Marr suggested.
“We mustn’t forget ——” Barney enunciated carefully. He had knocked back his drink — we all had, I’m afraid — and was refilling our glasses. “We must not forget that Standish, too, has suffered a loss — a loss almost as great as mine.”
I was not at all sure what he meant but I had little liking for the turn that the conversation — if one could call it a conversation — was taking, so I took care to interpret Barney’s remark in the sense that seemed best. “Yes,” I said. “I’ve lost my wife, too; in a different way but just as finally.” It was not my intention to sigh, but I sighed.
“That makes three of us.” Marr may have started with the purpose merely of backing me up but as he spoke recollection took over and he stared out through the window towards somewhere far away in time and space. “I lost my wife not by violence, not quickly. I saw her go half a grain a day for month after month. I thanked God when it was over.”
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