“About her book; she was writing one, I believe.” The light of sudden inspiration in her eyes, Cynthia leaned forward eagerly, clutching Mr. K. with both hands. “You’re a publisher, and she thought that you might bring her book out in America. That’s it!”
“She was a professional writer, Cynthia! Wasn’t she?”
“I don’t know much about the girl, of course, but I believe she was.”
“Then, if she wanted her book considered by Kennerley Forde, she’d know of more tactful ways of bringing it to our notice than by shoving an uncompleted manuscript into my hand the moment I set foot in the country on holiday.” At last Hector seemed to become aware of the cigarette that he was holding; he transferred it to his mouth and lighted it. “Anyhow your brother, Peregrine, has far more influence with old Kennerley than I have. The poor girl mightn’t have known that though.”
“I don’t know why the unfortunate creature should. I didn’t.” It appeared that Miss Walton felt herself to be affronted by her lack of knowledge; she spoke with an asperity that amounted almost to indignation. “Why should Perry know George Kennerley? He’s not his publisher.”
“No–but the old man would very much like to be, so he told me. They met when Peregrine was in the United States doing his book on the Nez Percés and became thick as thieves. They found that they shared the same passion for walking. Certainly Barbara Moore’s got nothing on the old man.” Hector smiled somewhat apologetically. “I know it doesn’t make any difference to anything, but I’m glad to feel that I can’t really have been used as a murderer’s bait.” He leaned over to pat Mr. K.’s head and to add in a lower tone–“I’m sorry for talking about the nasty business at all in front of the children.”
Cynthia seemed far from satisfied that her suggestion had been fully countered but, possibly agreeing that the occasion was scarcely a suitable one for the discussion of such matters, she remained silent.
“You needn’t worry about Michael; his mind is on other things,” said Mary in the rather old-worldly manner that sat so oddly on her childish shoulders. “Besides, his comics have inured him to the idea of violence, not that they’re anything like so bloodthirsty as the American Horror comics, of course. I read a book about them once–most instructive.” She sat hunched-up in the stern, one elbow propped on a knee, the other hand loosely holding the tiller; her eyes, staring straight in front of her, seemed to be fixed not on the farther shore towards which the boat was steadily chugging nor on the intervening water but on some inward vision. “Nobody has discussed the murder with me really intelligently,” she pursued, “but it seems obvious that if we had all gone to Shannon to meet you, Hector, and had come back here right away after your plane got in, that woman would not have been harpooned on our very doorstep.”
Duffy had been watching the slight ripple from the bow that stretched across the still surface to the banks beyond the Moore Court jetty where the moor fowl busied themselves in the muddy shallows; nothing else in sight seemed to move or to have life, except for a flight of gulls clamouring over a shoal of small fish on the incoming tide. It was with reluctance that the detective fell to wondering how Mary knew that the crime had been committed on the “very doorstep”–if the expression were more than a mere figure of speech–for the fact had not been made public. She had certainly, however, succeeded in getting a rise out of her two cousins.
“Look! Couldn’t we talk about something else for a change?” Hector protested. “Fishing, for instance.”
Cynthia Walton was more forthright. “Really, Mary, there’s no excuse for going on and on about it and even less for your choice of language,” she declared with brisk severity. “You were right and your grandmother’s judgment was at fault for once. I think you might now have the grace not to crow–more especially since your suggestion that Hector would probably land at Shannon while you were all waiting at Dublin was not only disrespectful to your grandmother but may well have given the murderer the idea in the first place.”
Mary gasped. “I did not,” she snapped. Her voice rose to an indignant squeak as she reiterated–“I didn’t say any such thing, not to a single soul–outside the family. I think you’re very mean, Aunt Cyn.”
“Well, of course, if you’re going to deny it––”
“Certainly I deny it. I said it to you and Daddy and Uncle Perry, that’s all–and to Grandmama, too, but she only laughed instead of bearing malice about it. She’s the only one of my female relations I can talk in an adult way to. Women never stick to the point.”
Cynthia looked more than ever affronted; her tone when she spoke was one of wounded dignity. “You’re not showing yourself in a very good light, Mary. I don’t know what the superintendent will think of your manners–or your memory. You suggested to me quite clearly on last Monday that you believed you were all going to Dublin on a wild-goose chase on the following day before a stranger. I was getting ice-creams, remember?”
“That was just wasn’t so, Aunt Cyn. You’re imagining things. The heat of the argument seemed to have had a chilling effect on the little girl; the colour had gone from her face, and the hand that now gripped the tiller trembled slightly. “Thanks for the ice-cream all the same,” she added inconsequently.
Although Miss Walton had by no means been silenced, it was left to Michael to settle the matter. Apparently his preoccupation with whatever pirate craft or sea monsters or canoe-borne Indians he had been sighting in his imagination from the prow had not prevented the child from following the discussion; perhaps the mention of ices had served to jog his memory. He swung round from his position in the bows.
“Yes, there was somebody else there, too,” he informed his sister. “But she wouldn’t have an iced lolly–I asked her.” He signalised his return to his duties as lookout by shouting–“Land ho!”
Cynthia Walton’s look of relief was altogether disproportionate to the gravity of the argument, but she made no attempt to “crow,” as she had accused Mary of doing a few minutes earlier; she had proved her point and she allowed the fact to speak for itself. “Thank heaven for that,” she said with a little laugh. “I was afraid I might be going out of my mind. Getting panicky about memory lapses is a sign of old age, I suppose, though I shouldn’t have thought I was as hoary as all that.” She flashed her teeth at Duffy. “Getting statements from scatter-brains like us must be rather an unnerving business.” she suggested.
“Oh, I remembered her all right.” Mary spoke through the detective’s non-committal reply. “I just thought she didn’t count.”
“Surely everyone counts. Who is she. Mary?”
It was Michael who once more joined in the conversation to fill a silence which–on his sister’s part–seemed to be one of surprise. “Who’s who, Aunt Cyn?” he called. “Who are you talking about?”
“The young woman who spoke to us outside Cassidy’s on Monday.”
“It was that Allison gell,” said Michael carelessly, adding after a moment–“That’s what Grandmama calls her anyhow.”
“I hardly think that she can have murdered herself,” Mary observed.
“The woman who was mur–oh!” Cynthia Walton seemed utterly abashed as she stared at her little cousin. “How stupid, stupid, stupid of me. I should have realised.” Her brown, competent hands closed so tightly on Mr. K.’s shoulders that the dog gave a sharp little yelp of protest. “Of course I knew her face, vaguely, as one knows every face round here or in Moycarrick. I can’t always put names to them, though I should have guessed from her accent that she wasn’t one of the country people. You see, when we go into Moycarrick lots of people come up to speak to us, and quite often I can’t place them, though Aunt Josephine remembers everyone.” She appeared to find it necessary to justify herself to Hector, or perhaps to Duffy. “After all we’ve lived here always, the family I mean, for centuries. It’s easier for outsiders to recognise us than it is for us to identify everybody that we should know. If we had run into that poor creature in our own village, I�
��m sure I should have guessed who she was–or at any rate I’d have made it my business to find out–but in the street at Moycarrick she might have been anyone. It just goes to show how right you are, Hector: one ought to pay more attention to introductions.”
“I thought you knew her, Aunt Cyn,” said Mary. “Didn’t she go out to see you about her potty old book? She pestered everyone else.”
“Yes, she did but it was a Thursday–last Thursday–so of course I had gone to lunch at Moore Court. She left a note. But the point is not that I didn’t know her, it’s that I couldn’t place her. I remember now quite distinctly meeting her last year. Oh, really it does make me feel abysmally vague and stupid. Thank heaven we’re nearly home. You must all come in and have some tea.”
The boat had all but crossed the half mile or so of sea that separated the peninsula of Moore Court from the shore on which Cynthia Walton’s cottage could now be glimpsed through the trees. A roughly similar distance away on the starboard beam was the island beach where Lua Kennedy had lain naked in the sun, while, almost within call, the murderer had gone so efficiently about his work. It was odd, Duffy reflected, that so many people had apparently been equidistant from the scene of the crime at the time of its commission: Ivy O’Brien Moore, Peregrine and Cynthia Walton and Peregrine’s secretary, Lua–to say nothing of the road menders–had all been dotted round the circumference of a circle which had its centre on the blood-stained steps; yet, apart from the fact of the murder, there was no indication that any one of them had actually come within the circle. Indeed the timing of the crime suggested that, if all four were even telling the truth about each other, none of them could have been guilty of it. The fact remained, however, that someone had come and gone unseen and left behind him the butchered body of a girl. The detective desisted from his profitless reflections to listen; once again Mary was talking.
“I don’t think you’ve quite got my point either,” she was saying. “I’m not suggesting the murderer knew, or even guessed, Hector was going to land at Shannon and used the fact to bait a trap–just the opposite. If Hector had come straight here from the airport, instead of getting stuck in a pub, he’d have arrived here at about the same time as Joan Allison. The murderer wouldn’t have risked that. I’ll bet you a shilling he was just as confident as Grandmama was that Hector was going on to Dublin.”
“That’s right. My drinking habits are to blame for everything, after all,” Hector observed, with the obvious intention of ending the conversation on a lighter note, as he put out his hand to grab a ring in the small stone jetty that had suddenly loomed up beside him.
With the possible exception of its plumbing and its kitchen facilities, Cynthia Walton’s cottage was structurally as unpretentious as the dwelling of the humblest tenant on the O’Brien Moore estates, but it had been made to look extraordinarily attractive. Just sufficient blue had been used in the whitewashing of the outer walls to give the colour the vividness of snow; on a sharp-angled modern building it would have been too dazzling, but here, on the soft outline of the bulging walls, beneath neat thatch and against the deep richness of lawn and garden, it looked merely charming. The low building with its disproportionately tall chimneys stood no more than a stone’s throw from the water’s edge, surrounded by trees and separated by a hedge of escallonia from the laneway that terminated at the jetty. At the end of a flagged path the cottage door stood invitingly open.
“Bolts and bars are unknown in this part of the country,” Cynthia Walton said in explanation. “We never see strangers round here. In fact we very seldom see anyone at all, apart from our friends who come here specially for the purpose.” She grinned in her rather equine way. “All the same, it was careless of me to leave the door open; I once found a cow in my living-room. Come on in.”
She led her guests into the main room of the cottage, in which the original atmosphere had been carefully, though not too obtrusively, preserved–even to the machine-bellows beside the open hearth; then she left them, to put the kettle on for tea. Almost immediately she was back again in the doorway, her face white and a look of fear in her eyes.
“Somebody’s been here,” she said. “Somebody’s ransacked the house.”
The contrast between the peace of the surroundings and the sudden suggestion of crime was even more marked here in this pleasant cottage than it had been at Moore Court. There the very size and age of the house had hinted at past violence and made the present horror seem possible, whereas one expected events to be scaled down in scope and consequence in this pretty little place; nevertheless the memory of murder across the water immediately invested what might be a trivial matter with a sinister significance.
“Are you sure?” Hector inquired.
Duffy asked the policeman’s question. “Is anything missing?”
The children seemed to be more pleased than otherwise at the prospect of further excitement and rushed out, Michael squealing with delight, to investigate. Cynthia Walton stood aside to let them pass.
“Of course I’m sine,” she snapped; then more slowly she said–“I don’t think anything’s been taken, nothing–none of the things that I automatically checked up on anyhow. Come and see.”
The rest of the cottage consisted of a fair-sized bedroom, a small study and a box-room, with kitchen, bathroom and ancillary offices built on at the back. It was only in the box-room that the intruder had left any particularly obvious traces of his visit, but Cynthia insisted that her study-desk had also been “ransacked.”
“Things have been pushed about and turned upside down,” she explained. “I can tell by patterns in the dust. I’m afraid my desk is always too littered to get a proper cleaning. I write occasional newspaper articles, you know–or perhaps you didn’t. Anyhow I wipe over with a duster any bits of the surface I can get at–I did it this morning–yet you can see quite clearly a line of dust where I know that pile of manuscript was. Besides, the cover is on my portable, and I always leave the thing turned up for an out-tray. And I did think I had shut the door before coming out, though of course I never lock it.”
“Do you employ any staff here?” Duffy asked. “You must at least have a gardener.”
“A man comes over from Moore Court once a week, and a girl, the daughter of my only relatively near neighbours, comes in every second morning–not to-day though. That reminds me.” She turned to the children who were hovering boisterously in the background with her setter and making an inordinate amount of noise. “Mary my dear, run over like an angel and ask Mrs. Scully if she noticed any car, or indeed anyone at all, coming down the lane to-day. Take Mr. K. And I’m sure Hector would like the walk.”
Obediently the little boy and girl, the dog, and the American departed on their errand, leaving a deep silence behind them; through it came a monotonous, pulsating sound which had not earlier been audible. With a preoccupied expression Miss Walton continued to check the contents of her desk.
“That kills two birds with one stone,” she observed. “I can’t think with the children rampaging about the place.” She completed her scrutiny of one drawer and began on the next. “I wonder whose boat that is. There hasn’t been a strange one in the bay for ages.”
“Is it coming or going?” Duffy asked. He had not failed to notice with interest that Miss Walton was more than ordinarily observant and that her hearing was good. “It’s awfully hard to tell.”
“Impossible–just from the sound alone.” She cocked her head on one side to listen. “It’s on the other side of the island anyhow. Coming, probably, or we’d have heard it earlier. Sounds like a hire-job from the village.” She pushed in the bottom drawer with a gesture of finality. “Nothing seems to be missing–thank heaven,” she asserted in a voice that expressed both relief and puzzlement, “fortunately I had my purse with me.”
“I’m glad. All the same, we’ll have a fingerprint man out here to see what he can find. Don’t do any more dusting will you?” Duffy grinned as she arrested an automatic movement towar
ds the duster. “It wasn’t just a tramp, you know, or he’d have taken something. By the way, there’s a question that I’ve been meaning to ask you.”
“What is it?” She looked up at him sharply.
“We’ve been checking on any letters that came from the United States within the last couple of weeks. I believe one was delivered to you a few days ago. Can you tell me about it?”
“I can do better than that, Superintendent, I can show it to you. It’s one of the things I made sure was still here.” From a pigeon-hole in the desk’s superstructure she took a long envelope and handed it to Duffy. “I’d hate to lose that.”
The envelope was superscribed–The North Platte Mutual Insurance Corporation, Fifth Avenue, New York, II; it was addressed to Miss Cynthia Walton. Inside was a cheque for $600 made out to her order.
“It’s an instalment on an annuity that was arranged for me when there was a possibility that I might stay on to work in America,” she pursued. “The war and my father’s illness put paid to that idea though. It was delivered after I had left for Moycarrick last Monday, otherwise it would have been banked before this. My bank has no local branch.”
“I don’t leave cheques of that magnitude lying about for very long, myself,” Duffy agreed. “My bank manager appreciates them almost as much as I do.”
“Oh, so does mine–none more so.” She showed her teeth in an amused grin. “But one gets into fixed habits in the country, here in the depths anyhow. It’s because one doesn’t have the telephone to make spur-of-the-moment arrangements. My aunt drives in to Moycarrick every Monday and always calls for me, so that is my day for doing business. I wouldn’t get the same sense of security from making a lodgment if I didn’t do it personally; and I hate writing letters.” She began to drum with her fingers on the Insurance Corporation’s envelope which Duffy had returned to her with the cheque. “I had just come out of the bank last Monday after drawing my housekeeping money when we ran into that unfortunate creature. Really, she seemed quite a presentable young woman.”
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