“Is it quite certain?” Olive began.
“Florence Severn was an eye-witness,” Bobby told her.
“Is that why Thomasine tried to kill her?”
“Not altogether. Miss Severn tried to poison Thomasine with those chocolates, and Thomasine began to think it was one life or the other.”
“But are you sure Miss Severn sent them? Why did she?”
“It always lay between the two Severn women—the aunt and the niece—and if only Miss Olga had let us take her dabs we should have known it much sooner. Even yet we haven’t hers—at least, not to swear to. But we have the aunt’s, and they are identical with those on the inside panel of the knee-hole of Weston’s writing-table. She was hiding there when—she’s a small woman—when the murder was committed. She had watched Olga slip away from Mayfield. So she jumped to the conclusion that Olga was off to visit Weston on the quiet, as she herself had been used to do. She tried to follow. She lost Olga in the dark. Later she went to the house, and when she found the windows of the study open, as once they had been left open for her, she was quite sure it was Olga who was expected. She slipped in and hid, intending to confront the two of them—Weston and Olga—to take them in the act, as it were. I don’t know what she thought when not Olga but Thomasine came creeping in. Probably she was merely puzzled. But she lay still and watched and saw what happened. In her surprise and horror she betrayed her presence. Thomasine—one murder was enough—she couldn’t face another—tried to make herself safe by forcing Florence to sign a confession that she herself was guilty. Futile in one way. It would have deceived no one. But it did serve to make Florence keep silence—for a time. Afterwards, when we asked so many questions, she began to work herself into a panic for fear Thomasine should use the confession. And at last she made up her mind to try to get it back at all costs.”
“The chocolates she poisoned and sent to Thomasine?” Olive asked.
“Yes. Mr Weston had sent them to Olga in the first place. Olga wouldn’t touch them, and left them behind when she left her aunt’s. So Florence made use of them. She thought Thomasine had the confession hidden in her room, and she meant to offer to help in nursing her, and so get a chance to look for it. From what she’s been saying in her half-delirious state, I think her idea was only to make Thomasine ill, not to kill her. Willing to take the risk, though. Her life or Thomasine’s, she thought, and Thomasine thought much the same.”
“Poison is awful,” Olive said, shaken still when she thought of what had happened in her own kitchen, “but I almost think that that spying on her niece was worse. I suppose it was jealousy, and jealousy makes you forget everything.”
“Fear, too,” Bobby said. “She began to think she might have left finger-prints where she hid under the desk. Now-a-days every one has heard of finger-prints. That was at the bottom of all that about Olga’s vanity case and her own ring. She got hold of the vanity case, put her own dabs on it, and hid it where it was sure to be found. That was to suggest the knee-hole dabs were Olga’s. To stop our finding out they weren’t, she persuaded Olga not to let us take hers. As an additional precaution she put on an act about her ring she pretended was too loose on her finger and let me see it come off. If we managed to identify the knee-hole dabs as hers, she had her explanation pat. Oh, yes, she meant to say, my ring came off, and I had to crawl under Mr Weston’s desk to pick it up. Plausible enough for a jury, I expect, but so plainly put on for my benefit I was sure it meant she knew something and had something to hide. It fitted, if the ring didn’t.”
“It was rather clever of her,” Olive said reluctantly, “to think all that out.”
“It’s all been very clever, it’s because it was all so very clever I was able to see through it,” Bobby said. “Life is more simple. Weston himself was so clever he himself laid the trap that caught him. Baited it, too. One of his more elaborate schemes. I imagine there is little doubt of Ronald Franks being really his son. No telling for certain, but it seems likely. Franks’s mouth is Weston mouth and his nose is the family nose. When there was so much talk of unacknowledged illegitimate children, I remembered the vague sort of likeness I noticed the first time I saw him, though I couldn’t quite place it then. Illegitimate, no doubt, and other illegitimate children as well, I expect. Weston didn’t intend to have anything to do with any of them. Probably he never knew for certain if any of them were really his. Franks’s mother told him there had been a marriage—Scots fashion. Trying to excuse herself and keep his respect, perhaps. No one will ever know. Anyhow, the boy got a dusty answer when he wrote to Weston. But he remained convinced he was legitimate, he made himself acquainted with all his supposed father’s doings, when Thomasine Rowe became private secretary he managed to make friends with her. She seems to have fallen for him pretty heavily—goodness knows why. What on earth could a fine, strong, virile girl like her see in a twerp like Ronald Franks?”
“Strong and virile,” Olive said. “That’s just it. She wanted a child—subconsciously. Without what the B.B.C. lady the other day called ‘two years of nappy-washing’. So she chose Franks instead.”
“Well, I don’t know,” said Bobby doubtfully. “I suppose extremes meet. Opposites attract and all that. Besides, if she established Franks’s claim—and especially if Mr Weston died without making a will, and she knew he hadn’t and didn’t mean to—then she would be the wife of a rich man in full control of a big business and she in full and complete control of him. I take it she had no thought of murder when she started out that night. To strong, young people, an elderly man like Weston seems as good as dead already. But she made the mistake, the clever ones always make. She under-estimated other people. She never realized how quickly Weston knew all about her interest in his past life and her friendship with the Ronald Franks who had written to him. He knew most of what was going on round him; and when he knew Franks and Thomasine were in league, he realized why the extremely pretty girl he had chosen to work for him kept him so very much at a distance, and he saw his chance to get his claws on her. But he, too, did a spot of under-estimating. He didn’t realize how strong were her passions, how fierce her energies, how deadly her will. First of all he got rid of Florence Severn. Anyhow, he was tired of her. To put her off his real plans he let her think there was something between him and her niece, Miss Olga, and indeed he made a few tentative passes at Olga, hinting at marriage. His favourite opening gambit, by the way. Probably, too, he had some idea of making in that way a kind of flank attack on Martin. He knew Martin was in love with her.
“All this was enormously complicated by the sudden threat to his position as dictator in absolute control of the Weston West business. He tried to weave the two threads into one, and with some success, though in the end with a success that cut the thread of his own life.
“First, as if by accident, he let Thomasine get a glimpse of an envelope endorsed ‘Family papers—re Aggie and child’. She knew Aggie was the name of Franks’s mother. But it held no such papers, for none existed. It held instead ten fifty-pound bank-notes. Then one day he sent her off early, telling her at the same time that he was having Martin Wynne to dinner, and that afterwards they were going on to visit Mr Edwardes to talk it all over with him. That was to make her think the coast would be clear. And he had seen she had had a chance to have a duplicate key made for the safe. She ought to have seen things were being made altogether too easy for her, but she walked unsuspectingly into the trap. And when it sprang she took her own way out, a way that he had never thought of.
“Weston had got rid of Martin according to plan, and he sat there waiting for Thomasine. As it happened, I had let him know his bait was already being sniffed at. I told him some one had been in his room. Thomasine, of course, having a preliminary look round. She had been giving Franks his last instructions when I heard them talking before she sent him off top speed to fix up the alibi she had planned. It had to be accepted for him because it really was genuine, and it would therefore, she hoped, be accep
ted for her also. Meanwhile Weston had an unexpected visitor—Mr Edwardes, anxious to know the result of the talk with Martin. And, when leaving, Martin met Olga, who was anxious, too, to know the result of the interview with Mr Weston. Martin had been faced with the older man’s knowledge of his affair with Bessie Bell. Martin knew Bessie was going to be there. She had told him she had been sent for. He managed to make an excuse to get a word with her at the window of the room where she was waiting. He more or less defied his cousin, and when Olga met him he told her all about it. They stayed till the small hours talking in the summer-house and sheltering from the rain; and though we found dabs to show Martin had been there with a woman, there was nothing to identify the woman—both Olga and Florence Severn having taken precious good care we never got any of their dabs. Meanwhile Weston gave Edwardes a whisky and soda in the dining-room, and Edwardes has told us how all the time Weston seemed on the alert, listening. So he was. He got rid of Edwardes as soon as he could, and still waited till he heard sounds to tell him Thomasine was there, in the study, at work, trying to find the papers she hoped would prove her boy’s claim.
“A dramatic moment when those two faced each other. The safe was open, she had in her hand the bank-notes she must have been puzzled to find where she had expected birth and marriage certificates, or at least letters of proof. He must have thought he had her utterly in his power, that now she would have no choice. He had only to give the alarm and there she was, caught in the act, stolen bank-notes in her hand, the safe wide open. He thought she had no way of escape. She had. The Japanese knife. With that she struck. With that she saved herself and lost herself, exchanging the lie of attempted theft for the truth of accomplished murder.”
CHAPTER XXXVIII
CONCLUSION
FROM UPSTAIRS Florence Severn was calling. They went to her. She was sitting up in bed. She said wildly:—
“Thomasine Rowe wants to kill me. Don’t let her. She ran after me. Do you know why?”
“Because you saw her kill Mr Weston,” Bobby answered.
Florence looked at him bewilderedly. She sank back on her pillows. She said:—
“Oh, you know. How do you know? How long . . .?”
“Oh, for long enough,” Bobby answered. He went on talking. He felt the best way to win her confidence, to persuade her to talk herself, was for him to continue to talk and to let her understand how much he knew already. He was anxious to hear her own story of the previous night’s events. He said: “From the very beginning there was a good deal to suggest her guilt. Little things. Uncertain things. Things all pointing the same way, and yet never enough to make up certainty. Once she told me murder wasn’t murder when it was self-defence, and I thought, ‘Perhaps you struck in self-defence’. Once I called her, to Franks, ‘a striking’ young lady, and I thought he was going to faint. A casual word, but I wondered if it had called up an image in his mind of her—‘striking’. She was curiously callous about the death of the little dog she gave those chocolates to. It had been a nuisance, and she had removed it, and that was all. I wondered if she would be as callous and indifferent about removing other things in her way. Then I knew she had lied twice. First about being near the house the time I heard her voice in the grounds. But that might not have meant much, and she put up an ingenious explanation. She said perhaps Olga had imitated her voice. So I couldn’t be absolutely certain. But I could be certain that her alibi was faked. Ingenious, though, in its way. Because she had managed to get it supported by two honest, independent witnesses. But I knew it was faked. She spoke of sheltering from the rain on leaving the cinema, and I knew, because I had been in town late, that it was a clear, moonlight night when the cinemas closed. It rained earlier at Weston Lodge Cottage, but the rain-squalls only struck Midwych much later, between three and four. Wilkie made the same mistake. When he got the message that Weston wanted to see him again, he thought it might mean his other thefts had been discovered. He tried to find out on the quiet from Hargreaves. When he heard about the murder, he panicked. He had been in the house at the time secretly, there was the motive of the possibly newly discovered embezzlements, he felt sure he would be suspected. Self-conscious as only a third-rate actor can be, it always seemed to him he must be the centre of attention. As a matter of fact Weston had only wanted him back as a handy tool to use in the fight for the control of the Weston West business. He panicked badly. He tried to fake an alibi, too, by being on the platform when the early express from the south arrived and making a scene with the guard as if he had just arrived by it. In point of fact he had arrived the previous evening. He gave his story away just as Thomasine did by a blunder over the rain. He said he had been out in it and got wet through. But there was no rain after about four in the morning, and if he had come by the train he said—arriving at half-past four—he couldn’t have been out in it. He persuaded Hargreaves, too, to keep silent about his presence, and even to make a show of hostility by repeating gossip he thought I was sure to hear in any case. So, though psychologically he didn’t seem much like a murderer, he had to stay on the list. Just as well, perhaps that Mrs Parham, the cook, saw both him and Hargreaves standing together at the top of the stairs at the moment of the murder. He didn’t know that, and she didn’t say anything, chiefly for fear of getting Hargreaves into trouble. Of course, from the very beginning it was plain some one had been hiding in the study some time. But nothing to show who or how long, or what, if anything, had been seen. Only when the poisoned chocolates arrived—though at first I thought Thomasine might have sent them herself to herself—did I begin to guess what had really happened there in the Weston Lodge Cottage study, after the murder.”
“It nearly drove me mad,” Florence said slowly, “to feel she had my confession and might show it any moment. I thought if I made her ill I could offer to nurse her and that would give me a chance to get it back. Only she was so clever. She didn’t eat any of the chocolates, and I knew she knew I had sent them, because I could see how she was watching me—watching and waiting. I was afraid, and I sent for Olga to come back, and when I heard some one at the door I thought it was her. But it wasn’t, it was Thomasine. She looked at me and I looked at her, and she said could she come in, and I didn’t say anything, I just banged the door, and I locked it and I bolted it, and then I felt safe, and I went back to the kitchen and she was there. She had run round the house and got in by the back door. She showed me a great knife she had with her, and she showed me some of the chocolates I sent her and she said ‘Which?’ So then she said ‘Which?’ again, and I didn’t say anything because I couldn’t, and she held out one of the chocolates, and I knocked it out of her hand and I ran and she ran after me. Always she was close behind, but it was dark, dark, and she never found me. But now she will.”
“Not now,” said Bobby, “for last night she killed herself.”
It took a little time still to persuade her she was safe, but at last she seemed more composed and slept. Bobby and Olive left her then. Going downstairs Bobby remarked:—
“Not what you would call a fine character. I suppose you can make excuses for her—desperate with fear. Half crazy with panic.”
“Do you think Thomasine really meant last night to kill her?” Olive asked.
“Who knows?” Bobby asked. “Quite possibly at first it was partly an attempt to frighten her into submission again. The rather melodramatic knife or poison offer—Queen Eleanor and Fair Rosamund style—does suggest that. But later, in the dark, running in the night, in the orchard, she meant to kill all right. The killer’s look. Plain enough. Not a pretty sight, not a pretty memory, those two women running, to kill, to escape.”
“What will happen to her?” Olive asked. “Florence Severn, I mean.”
“Well, I don’t quite know,” Bobby answered hesitatingly. “We know she sent Thomasine the poisoned chocolates, because she has just said so. But only a verbal statement, and one made in an excited, rather hysterical condition. Could be repudiated all right. No other
proof. I could make out a case to submit to the Public Prosecutor, and I suppose I shall, but I don’t think they will authorize proceedings. I certainly shan’t press it. Then, again, she is clearly guilty of withholding evidence, but I can’t see any one wanting to prosecute in the circumstances. She was under pressure. Good counsel would get a jury sympathizing at once, and probably a ‘not guilty’ verdict. No, I think nothing will happen, and personally I should say she’s had a bad enough time. No more than she deserved, but no need to rub it in.”
“What about Ronald Franks?” Olive asked.
Bobby shrugged his shoulders. An answer with which Olive seemed satisfied. All he was worth and all that was necessary.
“Mr Wilkie?” she asked next.
“Oh, well,” Bobby said, and again it was an answer that seemed sufficient.
“Mr Wynne isn’t much hurt, is he?” Olive asked next.
“Oh, no. Probably it was Franks laid him out with a whack from behind. Not worth going into further. Common assault, that’s all. As I see it, Olga must have rung Martin up when she got her aunt’s S.O.S. Apparently he followed Wilkie to Weston Lodge Cottage, trying to find out what it was all about. Olga had told him about her aunt’s confession. He thought it might be in the safe. It wasn’t locked. Nothing in it of any value since Weston’s death. He started to look. But if the confession wasn’t there, the poisoned chocolates were, and Thomasine heard him, and thought it was the chocolates he was hunting for. So she made Franks knock him out from behind, using Mr Edwardes’s stick Wilkie had left behind him. It was Wilkie who took both the missing Japanese knife No. 3 and the walking-stick from Mr Edwardes’s house. He believed he was on the track of the criminal, and he wanted to be well armed. In his excitement he left traces of himself everywhere he went—the walking-stick at Weston Lodge Cottage and his hat at Mayfield when he was still trying to find Martin.”
Night's Cloak: A Bobby Owen Mystery Page 25