It was very hot; and yet, suddenly, there was a chill in the air, a chill of cold fear. It came to them, to each of them as they idled there, that this was no ordinary evening; that the shadow of terror had crept very close upon one of their company, that there was not much longer to go now, before this horrible game of hide-and-seek was to come to an end. As though to give point to the unspoken thought, a siren wailed and was taken up by a second and a third, until all the air was filled with their dismal cries. The sound shattered the icy silence; and as it died away Edward got slowly to his feet and faced them and Cockrill saw that the boy’s face was white, that his hands were trembling, that there was a beading of sweat along the line of his hair. He said, speaking slowly and wearily at first, but rising to a pitch of something very much like hysteria: “Cockie, I’m–I’m sick of this, I can’t stick any more of it … On and on and on, discussing and arguing and accusing–I’m–I’m sick of it, I can’t bear it any more. Why don’t you make up your mind and arrest me and take me away and–whatever it is they do …? Surely you can see, surely we can all see plainly enough that it was me–it must have been me … They all know it was me, they’ve been trying to pretend to you that it wasn’t, but they know it was … I don’t remember it, I don’t think, not really in my heart, that I did it; but–but I do do things that I don’t remember, and there you are; the vase was found broken in the drawing-room where the wreath was hanging crooked and I don’t remember dropping the vase, so I suppose I don’t remember what happened afterwards … I do do these things; I’ve done them before …” He swung round upon them suddenly and his pale young face stared piteously at them and his thin young hands were half held out in unconscious pleading … “You won’t … They won’t … I won’t be put in a loonie-bin, will I? I couldn’t bear that!”
Stephen sat on the balustrade beside Philip, very silent, his cigarette smoking itself out between his fingers. When the family flutter had died away, he got to his feet and pushed forward, took Edward by the arm and forced him into a chair. “Look, old boy–I told you down by the river today that I knew you weren’t mentally unbalanced. Now I know something very much more to the point. You aren’t a murderer either. I don’t just think. I know.”
Edward stared up at him, exhausted; half sullen, half eager. It was pitiful to see the gradual dawn of hope on the immature young face. “All that business about the crooked wreath,” said Stephen, speaking more to Cockrill now than to Edward. “That was all a plant to shift the blame onto him, poor kid. If a thing hung crooked it might catch his attention and cause him to glance up quickly at it; and it’s a perfectly good medical fact that in people subject to fugues and automatism and what-not, glancing up quickly may bring on an attack. Whether it was Edward who dropped the vase or not, I don’t know: Claire found it broken on the floor when she came into the house just before nine, didn’t you, Claire? But do you remember what I said to you when I came into the hall and you were picking up the bits?”
“You just said was it Edward again?–didn’t you, Stephen?”
“Not quite,” said Stephen. “I said–I must have said something more like, ‘Not Edward this time?’ Can’t you remember?”
Claire looked half-hopeful, half-incredulous. “Well, I can’t exactly remember the words. I know I said that it must have been him, because he’d just been in, and Peta had been teasing him and he was a bit upset and so forth; I’m afraid I just took it for granted that he’d dropped the vase … I’ve always thought so, all along.”
“We all thought so,” said Bella. “We know the vase was dropped and broken and the water and roses spilt: we saw it next morning, all of us. And the wreath over Serafita’s picture was hanging askew …”
“So Edward said just now,” said Stephen. “The wreath was hanging askew.”
“Well, Stephen, so it was,” said Peta.
“Not when I saw it,” said Stephen.
Edward got up slowly from his chair. He was absolutely white now, his hands shaking, the sweat rolling down his forehead; he faced them again, pathetically young and coltish in his adolescent weediness, but with a dignity about him, a passion of pain and disillusion and bitterly contemptuous reproach that had nothing in it of childishness. “You did this to me! One of you did this to me! You let me go through this hell … You let me think that I was mad and a murderer, a dangerous lunatic not fit to be loose on the world … Not fit to play with the baby, not fit to sleep alone in a room without the man of the family near, to protect the others, not–not fit to …” He broke down for a moment. He said: “This has been torture, the most horrible kind of torture. None of you can know what it’s been like; you can’t know what it’s like not even to be certain that you’re thinking sensible thoughts … You suddenly wake up and think, ‘Perhaps this is all just drooling idiocy, perhaps I don’t really know what’s going on about me, perhaps I’m living in a sort of dream not recognizing what people are actually saying to me … You–you make jokes and pretend you don’t care, but all the time you’re driving yourself mad thinking that perhaps people are only humouring you by smiling and pretending to respond, perhaps you’re not even talking sense, perhaps you think you’re a poached egg or–or Queen Victoria, or something, like the funny stories about lunatics … You–you wake up in the night and think and wonder, and–and dread being taken away to some terrible place, and then say to yourself that perhaps that’s part of a ‘persecution mania,’ and you make a terrific effort all over again to seem as if you’re normal and don’t care … And one of you did this to me! One of you broke the vase and spilled the water and arranged the wreath, so that all this hell should fall on me … Not to speak of the fact that I had to believe myself a murderer …”
Bella rose, putting out her hands to him. “Oh, Edward, darling, for God’s sake …”
“Don’t touch me, Bella,” he said. “I don’t want anyone to touch me or come near me. One of you, one of my own family, one of my own family, let me think I was mad. One of my own family …”
Peta said: “Darling, don’t go on and on saying ‘one of my own family.’”
He whirled round with a face of cold fury. “God help me, Peta, I believe you would walk through a battlefield, looking at the wounded men lying there in the mud–and make a joke of it!”
“Summer time, darling,” said Peta. “No mud.”
They were both very white.
“No one should know better than you, Edward,” said Ellen in her matter-of-fact voice, “that the Marches are never more flippant than when they’re minding about something very much. As for your family–well, most of us aren’t exactly your family, my dear, are they? That’s what you seem to mind most, that one of your own flesh and blood should do this to you, so perhaps it’ll make you feel just a little better if you remember that, after all, you’re not a March. If I did this thing–but I didn’t actually–well, I’m not your family at all; and Peta and Claire and Philip–they’re only half-cousins, or whatever it is; you’ve only got a grandfather in common, haven’t you? You and I, Teddy, we’re outside this lot, really, aren’t we? I only belong to it through Philip. Your grandmother was Bella. Theirs was Serafita. You and I and Bella, we haven’t really any part, darling, in the ancestor worship and ballet-dancing and rose-wreaths and coloured gloves.…”
Her level voice went on and on, trying to calm and soothe him; she knew that it did not matter very much what she said. While she spoke, Cockrill got up quietly and, almost unobserved, went into the house. He went into the drawing-room and stood for a little while underneath Serafita’s portrait, looking up at her. “You have a lot to be responsible for, my dear,” he said to the smiling face, and so returned to the terrace again and sat down quietly in his chair. Ellen had stopped speaking and they all sat silent while Edward still stood, towering above them, given over to his ashen rage. “One of you, one of you! Letting me bear the blame … I’ll tell Cockie; I’ll tell him everything we’ve worked out; he thinks it couldn’t have been any of
you and so it must have been me … But it could have been any of you; I’ll tell Cockie; I’ll make him see …”
“Oh, Edward, darling …!” pleaded Bella.
He turned on her furiously. “Keep quiet! Keep quiet! If–if it hadn’t been for you filling me up with stupid nonsense, taking me to see the wrong kind of doctors, phony ones, sensational ones who told me I might do things and made me experiment and want to see if it would really happen … Making me think I was queer and different …” He broke off, then shouted, standing over her, both of them white and shaking, both almost in tears: “If I’m mad, you’re mad! If I’m mad, where did I get it from? Perhaps you killed Grandfather, perhaps you did squirt poison over his food–you could have! Perhaps you’re mad, Bella; if I am, why shouldn’t you be?”
“But the whole point is that you’re not, Edward,” said Stephen in his quiet way. “And if you’re not, there’s no reason to suppose that Bella is. And unless she was mad and did it without a motive, she surely wouldn’t have killed Sir Richard; why should she?”
Edward turned away with a sort of half-movement, like a hurt animal. “Well, I don’t know … Anyway, it was one of you. Wasn’t it, Cockie? Her or Peta or Claire or Philip or–who’s left?–Ellen.”
“It was one of six people here,” said Cockrill, steadily.
“Well, all right, counting me.” He looked round him almost as though he were the centre of some game at a children’s party. “It couldn’t be Ellen, because of Brough. And it couldn’t be Philip because we don’t really believe, not seriously, that he isn’t Philip; and, of course, Dr. Newsome wouldn’t have made such a mess of the time-of-death business. We were silly to think of that.”
“Thank you,” said Philip, sarcastically; but one couldn’t really resent what he said, poor desperate boy.
“So that leaves–it leaves Peta and Claire. And Claire–well, Peta showed, that day, how Claire could have gone up the path the night before and killed Grandfather and come away; and only pretend to go up it the next morning and see him sitting in the window.” He looked rather frightened; and shame-faced. “Well, you heard Peta say it, Cockie; I’m not telling you. It–it could have happened.”
There was a silence. Claire said at last, “Well–Ellen?”
“Yes?” said Ellen.
“Aren’t you going to tell Edward about that morning? You were standing on the balcony outside your bedroom; you could see right over the bushes at the edge of the drive–you could see down to the lodge. You must have seen me walking up the path to the French window, and running down again. You know that I really did go up the path.”
Ellen said nothing. She thought: “This bitch tried to steal my husband, she nearly succeeded in stealing him (which is what hurts!). She wanted him because she wanted somebody–not because she really loved him. She’s self-centred and–and not real; she’d have made him miserable and unhappy, she’d have driven him mad with her emotionalism and scenes and play-acting … Why should I help her out? Let her suffer a bit!” She tipped back her garden chair and looked at Claire coolly. “Did you? I don’t think I noticed.”
Cockrill, with sardonic amusement, watched her face. “It doesn’t matter anyway, Ellen, because if Claire hadn’t gone up the path as she says she did, how could she have left the breakfast tray in the middle of it?”
“Oh. So that leaves me,” said Peta. “What fun.” She did not look as though she found it fun at all.
Cockrill sat rocking pleasantly back and forth on the hind legs of his chair, nursing his white panama hat. “The case against Peta is an interesting one. She had a great deal to lose if the new will was signed. She went with Lady March down to the lodge clad only in her bathing suit, of which there isn’t much, because I’ve seen it. She couldn’t have concealed a hypodermic syringe about her person, but I suppose there’s no reason why she shouldn’t have carried two or three tiny glass ampoules, tucked up the leg of her trunks; they were so closely fitting that it would have kept them there; that would have been enough, if she could have got down the tumbler from the shelf and introduced the coramine into it, so that your grandfather, when he went for a glass of water, would fill up the glass and drink the whole lot off. But the point about the glass is that Peta couldn’t have got the stuff into it without touching it; and that if she had touched it, she must have left fingerprints on it. That glass hadn’t been polished: it was still a little dusty on the outside. So Peta couldn’t have murdered Sir Richard either; her prints were not on the glass–only his.”
Now was the time to tell Cockie. Now, if he really was going to put his threats into action, was the time for Edward to tell Cockie that Peta could have touched the glass, and left no marks; to tell Cockie how it was that though she had touched the telephone she had left no marks on that either–to tell Cockie how Philip had suggested that Peta might have covered her fingertips with colourless varnish; that she could be–must be–the murderer! Now was the time. They had deceived him, terrified him, they had let him suffer to take responsibility for this horrible crime; now was the moment to pay them all back, to speak out and tell Cockie all he knew. He opened his mouth to speak; to tell about Peta, to tell Cockie to deliver up Peta to–to God knew what horror of prison and trial and condemnation and death … Peta, so pretty and sweet and gay and laughing–so vulnerable, in her foolishnesses and her tendernesses … Yet if Peta was a murderess–if Peta had let him suffer … He turned away and went to the edge of the terrace and stared down at the river. Let someone else speak. Not he.
It was Peta who spoke. She said: “Oh, Teddy darling–thank you!” and to Cockrill added, quite gaily: “The family have a theory about my fingerprints, Cockie; we’re so full of theories and this is the one about me. They think I put colourless enamel over my fingertips to stop them making prints. They think I did it that way; but the important thing is–do you?”
“No,” said Cockrill, and he put his hand in his pocket and fished out something and laid it on the table before him, not taking his eyes off her face. Peta said: “Good God!–what’s that?”
It was a pair of flesh-coloured, elbow-length gloves.
They all stood staring at them. Bella said: “Gracious, Cockie, where on earth did you get those?”
“From the little casket under the portrait in the drawing-room,” said Cockrill. He picked them up and bundled them back into his pocket. “I thought it was my handkerchief; I’d forgotten I had them there.”
“I thought you were going to tell us that Peta had worn a pair of Serafita’s gloves,” said Bella, laughing a little, nervously. “There are a pair in the casket in the lodge, only, of course, they’re black, and Peta couldn’t possibly have worn them without my seeing them; and Richard would have, too.”
“You frightened me, Cockie,” said Peta.
“You were right to be frightened,” said Cockrill. “You ought to be frightened: you all ought to be frightened, because something very bad and horrible and cruel has taken place and I think it’s time you all faced up to the fact; really faced it, didn’t play with theories and suspicions and silly accusations that you don’t really believe in–but looked the fact square in the face, that one of six people here on this terrace is twice a murderer …”
Not Peta. And not Claire. And not Bella and not Philip and not Ellen and not Edward. Cockrill waited. And suddenly Edward said, in a whisper: “You can’t mean–Stephen?”
Even Cockrill looked startled. “I’m sorry, Stephen,” said Edward. “I didn’t mean I thought that! I only thought Cockie did. And, of course, after all, you being keen on Peta and wishing she wasn’t an heiress and all that …” To Cockrill he said: “You did it on purpose, Cockie. You’re playing with us all; you’re going on and on at us, hoping that someone will break down and give themselves away. You’re–you’re like a cat with us poor little mice, scared to death all round you: you’re doing it deliberately to make the murderer confess …!”
“Yes,” said Cockie. “I could put my hand out and
take the murderer now, this minute; the murderer of Brough and of your grandfather. But I think it would be–well, less terrible all round, if he’d confess; if he or she would confess. I have known you all for a long time; I knew your grandmother, Serafita; I knew Lady March when she first came here, I remember very well how naïve and charming she was in her eagerness and inexperience … I remember Peta and Claire and Edward when they were little children, I remember Philip when he first came home to Swanswater and Sir Richard killed the fatted calf for him, I remember Ellen as a bride … That’s why I am giving the murderer this one chance. That’s why I say to the murderer: This is the end. These are the last minutes; for God’s sake, get this thing off your soul! Isn’t there a little gleam of reparation to be made for the irreparable harm you’ve done–by putting out your hand now and saying ‘Take me,’ instead of just letting yourself be ignominiously taken …?”
Bella, Peta, Claire, Ellen, Philip–one of these five. Edward looked round at them imploringly. “One of these five, Cockie; one of these five? There isn’t anyone else. There’s nobody else …”
“Well, only one other person,” said Cockrill.
“One person? One other person?”
Cockrill took out his little tin of tobacco and his papers and with great deliberation, concentrating deeply after his uncharacteristic outburst, he made himself a cigarette. When it was rolled and lighted, he tossed the match over the balustrade into the river. “Edward, my boy–this is as clever a frame-up as ever I have known. Somebody such as yourself is the perfect scapegoat. You are or you are not mentally unsound; nobody knows. If anything inexplicable occurs, the responsibility may easily enough be fixed on to you and even you yourself need not know for certain whether or not you are the real culprit. The family will fight tooth and nail to protect you from discovery; but if you are finally accused and convicted, nothing very dreadful can happen to you after all. You will be detained ‘at His Majesty’s pleasure,’ which in a case would largely be a matter of seeing that you could never again do any harm, to yourself or anyone else. Ye Gods, yes,” said Cockie, ruminating over it, “this was a cleverly thought-out plan! At the worst you would be an object of interest and pity, living a life of comfort, subjected only to proper supervision. The chances were that by the united efforts of the family, you could be protected from discovery and the thing would simply resolve itself into an unsolved mystery; but if somebody had to take the responsibility, why you were the one person who could take it and not be held responsible …”
Crooked Wreath Page 18