That evening he invited David and Jill to coffee in his room after dinner. And when they were comfortably disposed round his fire, he began, without hesitation or apparent pain, to talk about the case.
“They tell me Terry Byrnes has gone into the Police Force,” he said. “Or intends to do so, after his military service. He’ll be a very useful member, I should think.”
“It was the nice things the judge said to him that made up his mind,” said Jill. “About having shown himself a good citizen, and on the side of the law. And that if it hadn’t been for him the crime might never have been disclosed.”
“I don’t think that was strictly true,” said David. “Terry quite accidentally saw the crime committed, but the finding of the bones on the roof was bound to happen sooner or later, because all roofs are visited for repairs sooner or later. They would have lasted, even in their exposed position, for a very long time, and they were unusual enough to rouse curiosity about their origin in almost anyone.”
“Janet Lapthorn, too,” said Hilton, “being Janet, was bound to act as she did. And after a time, even without the other information, I should have acted myself, and probably been convicted.”
“No,” said David. “You could not have been confused with Rust. And I think that, even without Terry, the case would have developed exactly as it did. Because the murderer arranged his own destruction.”
There was a silence, while Hilton thought this over.
“Yes. I suppose you are right,” he said at last. “He shouldn’t have tried to mix me up in it.”
“Exactly. If he had done nothing, we should never have got him. He was clever enough to leave no links between Norris, Goode, Rust, and Young. But he overdid his cleverness. He wanted more. He wanted revenge.”
“Revenge?” said Hilton and Jill together.
“Revenge for the dreadful position he felt you had put him in. As you know from the trial, he was a gambler and always out of funds. Also, he was full of envy of the prosperous people, like Basil Sims, whom he saw every day waiting for the business train, while he could do nothing better than stand, selling them newspapers. He was certainly attracted by your wife, but he was attracted more by her position, as he thought of it, and by her supposed wealth. After she went to live with him I think he expected an easy divorce, and alimony that would give him all the extra money he needed. He must have been bitterly disappointed by your stand. How much worse would he feel when he realized, as he must have done, that Mrs. Hilton was getting upset and frightened by their position and their increasing poverty! That motor-bike, secondhand though it was, must have made quite a hole in their income.”
“So you think he planned to kill her and put the blame on me?”
“No. It is possible, but he was not cool or calculating. He was a person who lost his head and his temper very easily. He proved that on several occasions. No. We can’t be sure what happened that foggy night in November, but we do know that Mrs. Bracegirdle refused to have them in her house any longer, and threatened to call the police. That would have meant ruin for him: publicity would have lost him his job, as well as Felicity. I think they went off together, and in desperation, trying to keep her with him, he broke into that ruined house, and they spent the night there. Miserably enough, in the dark, with only a few old dirty decayed blankets to lie on. I think that by the morning your wife had made up her mind to return to you. She must have told him so, and in his irritation, from the discomfort and the continuing fog, and his realization of his failure, his many failures, I think he worked himself into a violent rage, which so frightened her that she rushed away from him into that room overlooking the railway, trying to escape, trying to call for help. Immediately afterwards he had enough to do concealing the crime; but after that he had to try to move his load of guilt: he tried to put it upon you, because your understanding and forgiving attitude to your wife had taken her from him even before he took her life.”
Hilton shielded his face with his hand, looking sadly into the fire.
“Of course, we can’t be sure,” David went on. “There may have been some other reason for the mad course he embarked on. Before that first week-end visit of his to Duckington there was nothing whatever to connect him with you. You would never have thought of him. You never did think of him, did you?”
“No. Never once. Though I saw him every day.”
“Perhaps his lesser mistakes would have betrayed him in the end. He had ideas, but he was careless. It was highly dangerous to leave the suitcases with Mrs. Bracegirdle, because it became too dangerous later, after the hunt started, to attempt to get them back. It was silly and mean, or very careless, not to pay Mrs. Hunt what he owed her for electricity. And the same with old Harding. He left grievances wherever he went, and unsatisfied people always complain. Harding, who suspected him of dirty work, would not have accosted me, thinking I was Young, if he had not also wanted the money Young owed him. It was foolhardy in the extreme of Young to give Shirley that brooch, but he was probably afraid to take it to a jeweller, and I think we had rather given him to understand, by then, that you were the chief suspect. No, on the whole,” David finished, “he cooked his own goose, as most of them do. They have this uncontrollable itch to display their guilt, explain it, justify it, or transfer it. He ran true to form.”
“When did you first spot him?” asked Hilton.
“I had a faint suspicion the first time I went to Boxwood by train. There was a boy in charge at the bookstall. He said for one thing that Young had been away from work, sick, in November. And he also said, which surprised me, something about Mrs. Sims being a smasher, as he put it, but not such a smasher as Mrs. Hilton. When I showed surprise he mumbled that that was what the boss had said. I just wondered.”
“And kept on wondering,” said Jill. “I know you.”
“Of course, I ought to have spotted the advertisement boards. But I didn’t. One is so unobservant.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” said Alastair Hilton.
Copyright
First published in 1953 by Methuen
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Copyright © Josephine Bell, 1953
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