After our first meeting Laurie and I simply managed to see each other all the time when we weren’t actually working. We talked about every subject under the sun except two. We did not mention the shooting, although the shadow of it hung between us like a sheet of glass, and we did not actually talk of love. After a week the situation was unbearable and I fled to spend a couple of nights at home with the laudable idea of trying to clarify my mind. The clearer it became the more wretched I grew.
The story of Dorinda’s death was one of those mysteries whose solution appears only too obvious from the very beginning. My father, Dr. Davies, had been one of the more popular medical men in Meade. Laurie’s father, Sam Butler, was the County architect. I was a few months old and Laurie himself was a child. We lived near each other and belonged to the same set. Dorinda Davies was just nineteen and beautiful. She had come to us to spend the summer, partly to help Mother with me and partly to take a share in the social season which in those far off times was gay enough to attract any young girl. From the outset she was a tremendous success. I grew up with a child’s belief that she was the most dazzling heroine of romance who had ever lived, but if not quite that, it does appear that she was unusual, pretty, popular and vivacious.
The whole town was shaken when tragedy overtook her. Early one evening about eight weeks after her arrival her body was found in a meadow by the river on the outskirts of the town. She had been shot at close range with a light sporting gun, which lay in the grass a few yards from the body. Our family punt, in which she had been seen alone earlier in the day, was tied up to some willows near by.
The police identified the gun very quickly. It belonged to Mr. Butler. He and his wife were away on a weekend trip, but Laurie had been left behind in the care of a housekeeper and already he had been punished twice for shooting without permission. Also he had told several people that he had wanted to bag a water-rat. After that, it was only a matter of hours before they discovered witnesses who had actually seen him trotting down to the water-meadows in the hot afternoon, the gun under his arm.
Old Inspector Andrews, who was in charge of the case, was a family man himself and it was said that the business broke his heart. He talked to Laurie and made up his mind that it had been an accident, and that the child was too frightened to own up. He thought the boy had been showing the gun to the girl when the shot was fired, and he did everything he could to make him admit it.
Unfortunately Laurie had a different story and nothing would make him alter it. He agreed that he had taken the gun, knowing that he was doing wrong, and that he had gone down to the river to wait for a rat. He was in position, he explained, crouched down by a tree stump, when Dorinda came drifting along in her boat, playing a portable gramophone. He called to her, asking her to be quiet and not to scare the rat, but he thought he frightened her, for she turned very red, he said, and was furious with him. She came into the bank and asked him if his father knew that he was out shooting. He had to confess that he did not, whereupon she insisted that he gave her the gun at once before he did any harm with it. He was not enthusiastic, naturally, but she was grown-up and quite capable of telling on him, so finally he gave way. He parted with his prize and according to him the last time he saw it was as it lay in the bottom of the skiff as she sped away downstream. After that, he said, there was no point in waiting, and so he came home and played in the garden until supper-time.
It was an inconclusive tale, highly unsatisfactory in the circumstances. The hideous fact remained, Dorinda was dead. No one believed Laurie.
Sympathy for both families was very great in the town and the Coroner’s court, with a kindness more well meant than actual, brought in an open verdict. After a while Sam Butler resigned his job and the family moved elsewhere.
As far as I could gather afterwards, our lot behaved very well, but Daddy never made any bones about his beliefs. For him there was no mystery. Dorinda had been the victim of a tragic accident, and the Butler boy was a dangerous young liar with bad blood in him somewhere. So there it was.
I looked at Mother again. “You don’t think Dad’s attitude may have mellowed?” I began halfheartedly, but she silenced me.
“I know it hasn’t. He was speaking about it only the other day. He surprised me. He’s still very bitter about the lying. He feels that if only the child had been made to own up it would have settled things once and for all, and there wouldn’t have been all the talk about the poor girl afterwards.”
“Talk?” I murmured, surprised. “I thought she was supposed to be the complete innocent.”
“Oh well, of course, she was.” Mother’s round face grew even pinker. “No one could criticize her when she was dead, dear.” She paused, honesty compelling her, no doubt, and added unexpectedly, “To be truthful, she was something of a nightmare to me. I was only five years older, you see, and I couldn’t begin to manage her. Girls were wild in those days, too. However, don’t you dare to repeat that. Daddy would never forgive me.”
“I won’t,” I said hastily, but she had made me curious. “What brought the subject up?” I inquired. “You noticed that paragraph about Laurie’s experiments, I suppose?”
“No, darling. I’m afraid I didn’t.” With extreme delicacy she managed to convey that whilst being on my side she still didn’t like to hear the tabooed name on my lips. “We heard on the news that John Ryder, the painter, had died somewhere down in Cornwall, and we began to talk about him. He and his wife were staying at the Johnson’s cottage down here when it all happened. He was very struck with Dorinda and he had asked Daddy if she could sit for him. There was some talk that the portrait might get hung in the Royal Academy and we were all wildly excited about it.” She caught my eye and laughed. “We were a very ordinary lot of provincials, I’m afraid. Oh Judy, my dear, you’re horribly right, it is a long time ago.”
I kissed her and let the matter drop. Both she and Father are darlings and I adore them both, but their life in a small country town has not made them exactly flexible in outlook. With the years, to put it mildly, their ideas have tended to become set. Meantime, my own predicament had not grown any easier. I found I was searching my heart almost eagerly to see if I was missing Laurie any less, which was absurd. He filled my whole world and there was never going to be any escaping from him. I felt that in my bones.
I assumed Mother had decided to let well alone and would ignore our conversation, but on Sunday evening, just as I was in bed, she came trotting in with an envelope in her hand.
“Look, Judy,” she began, sounding faintly conspiratorial although Daddy could hardly have heard her down three flights of stairs, “this is what I meant about Dorinda. See how lovely she was and how—well, how wild.” She sat down on the quilt, opened the envelope and shook two photographs out on to my lap. I turned them over curiously. They were snapshots but they had been printed on square sheets of paper with official looking hieroglyphics printed under them. Each was a picture of the same girl in different poses, and one negative was very much clearer than the other. I saw that she had been a raving beauty of the period, very much more made up than I had realized was the fashion and there was certainly provocativeness in her attitude as she sat on the grass, looking up and smiling. The other photograph, although it had been taken at the same time, since the dress and background were the same, was very blurred. One could only just make out her shadowed face as she leant back against a tree trunk, the leaves making patterns across her distinctive white skirt with a scalloped hem.
“You can guess she was a handful,” Mother went on. “There were such a lot of men about then. Young husbands, and old ones, too. I had quite a time one way and another. The wives always came to me.”
I could imagine that they would. It would hardly be much use going to the young baggage in the photograph. I felt I was getting a new angle both on Dorinda and on Mama. I turned the pictures over.
“What are these?” I inquired idly. “Exhibits at the Coroner’s court?”
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p; “I suppose they must be,” she agreed. “The police gave them to your father when the case was closed. They were found in her camera, which was lying right there beside her in the grass. Two exposures had been made and so the police developed the film. That was her new dress. She’d never worn it before that day. See the scalloped hem? That’s how they knew when the snap was taken. She’d only had the dress on for those three hours before she died.”
“Really?” That was a piece of data I’d never heard. “Did they discover who took these, darling?”
“Oh, they were certain the boy did. I don’t think he admitted it, but it was quite obvious that he met Dorinda and that they talked, and she asked him to snap her, and then he started showing her his gun and, of course, it went off. I always blamed the parents. Fancy going away for a weekend and leaving a gun where a child could reach it!”
I hardly heard her. I was looking at the photograph of the lovely face smiling so invitingly at the camera. The curve of the full throat was sensuous and the shape of the swelling breast just apparent under the silk dress.
“Have I seen this before?” I demanded. “I think I have.”
“You may have done, dear. That was the one the police reproduced everywhere on the off-chance that someone would come forward to say they’d seen them together that afternoon. The other one wouldn’t reproduce. No one did come forward, though. My word, she was a pretty girl, wasn’t she?”
“Staggering, as far as I can see from these,” I said and handed them back to her.
She studied them again and began to talk as people do about old photographs.
“If only this one had come out properly you’d see what I mean about her so much better,” she rambled on. “It wasn’t only her appearance. I don’t suggest there was any harm in her but she did like to provoke people. This second picture shows that if you study it, but it’s no good, the negative was over-exposed and I should say the child moved when he took it. All the same,” she added brightly, “I do believe those old cameras took better pictures than the very expensive new ones.”
I did not answer. I was still bothered by the first picture, the one the police had reproduced. Something about it had struck me as being curious but for the life of me I couldn’t define it. Mother cut into my thoughts by suddenly gathering her papers and rising.
“I don’t hold it against the little boy,” she said in a sudden burst of confiding, “but, oh my pet, do get over it if you can. It’s irrevocable, you see. At this distance nothing is true about a thing like that except what people believe. Daddy and I could forgive him but we could never get it out of our heads that he’s naturally careless and tells lies. It isn’t only us, either. The case made quite a sensation. You’ll find that nearly everyone of our age or older will feel exactly the same way about it. You being you just turns it into a story people will want to tell.”
She went out, leaving me so flattened that I did not notice until later that she had left the second photograph—the bad one—on the bed. Without thinking I put it in my handbag which was lying on the side table, and switched off the light.
She was right; I could see that. I went back to the hospital and work and for a few more days Laurie and I kept up our pretences. I did not broach the subject because I was terrified lest anything should shatter the cloud-cuckoo-land dream in which I seemed to be wandering, but in the end matters came to a head. It happened almost casually, as such things so often do.
We had been for a long walk together and had come back through one of the pretty villages just outside the university town, and as we crossed a stone bridge over the river we paused to look down at the shallow water hurrying over the pebbles. I remember thinking that the spot was traditionally romantic and that Laurie was downright conventionally handsome, with his Nordic face and tow-coloured hair, and then I laid my hand on the parapet and he dropped his own over it.
“Oh, my dear girl,” he said, in probably the most unromantic way such a declaration was ever dragged out of a man, “this can’t go on. I shall be sick.”
Fortunately I laughed so much it did not matter my eyes watering.
“That’s exactly how I feel,” I said.
He did not speak at once but went on holding my hand very tightly. finally he turned me round to face him.
“How idiotic that it had to be us,” he said. “You and me, I mean. You think I killed that relative of yours, don’t you?”
It was not at all what I had expected and I was unpardonably clumsy.
“My dear,” I said, “no one could blame a child of eight who—”
“That’s not what I asked you, Judy. You’ve answered me all the same. You think I shot her. So does everybody else in the world.”
I stared at him and for the first time doubt concerning the question entered my mind, and as it did so I realized what it was that had struck me as being so strange about the snapshot Mother had shown me.
“Do you mean to say you didn’t?” I demanded.
He gave me a queer sidelong glance under his lashes.
“I wish I thought I had,” he said deliberately. “Unfortunately I don’t. I never did. That makes me odd man out. Before God, Judy, if I shot that girl I did it in a brainstorm, and all my life since I’ve been terrified I’d have another.”I felt my heart turn over in my chest, I was so appalled by the revelation. The agony the child must have suffered, the horror of adolescence in such circumstances.
“Darling,” I exclaimed involuntarily, “what a miracle you stood it. Of course, of course you didn’t kill her. She was going to meet somebody. That’s why she was so angry when you appeared on the bank so inopportunely.”
He stared. “That’s what my father tried to believe. What put it into your head?”
“The photograph.” The words came out of my mouth before even I realized their full implication. “That girl wasn’t smiling up at a child when that snapshot was taken.”
He frowned. “Wasn’t she? I don’t really remember the picture. I know there was one and I recall a rather kindly old copper trying to persuade me to say that I took it. But it didn’t mean a thing to me. I was simply sticking to what I believed was the literal truth. Never, at any point in my life, have I been able to remember anything different from the story I told the police, yet now it does seem to me that if there had been any other possible explanation they would have discovered it. That’s the mischief of the whole wretched situation. Nothing can ever be proved, and after all this time it’s what everybody believes which is the reality.”
They were so nearly Mother’s words all over again l felt a wave of sheer dismay pass over me.
“But it’s all wrong,” I burst out, stammering in my excitement. “It’s—it’s monstrous! Don’t let it make any difference to us, Laurie. Please darling, that would be wicked.”
I heard him catch his breath. “You’re the sweetest thing, Judy. I love you. I want to ask you to marry me more than anything in the world, but I shan’t because I know I couldn’t stand the publicity all over again and I don’t think you could.”
“Publicity—” I began contemptuously but he cut me short.
“My dear, you’ve no idea what it’s like. It’s not the paragraphs in the newspapers, or even the rehashing of the whole dreary story which can only have the same hopelessly indeterminate conclusion—either I’m a liar or a lunatic. It’s the letters from people one’s never heard of.”
“Good heavens,” I ejaculated. “Surely they didn’t write to you as a child?”
“Did they not!” He was bitter. “My father and mother were almost driven to suicide. People wrote condoling, or censuring, or suggesting idiotic solutions. Some were spiteful, some were ostensibly well-meaning, but they were all utterly relentless. I tell you, the public’s reaction to a story which takes its fancy is fearsome. It can shake you up horribly, especially if you don’t know quite how guilty you are.”
I said nothing. I was both scandalized and scared. Also I loved him so much that the pros
pect of losing him made me feel positively faint.
“Are you sure people would still be interested after all this time?” I ventured at last.
He grimaced. “Some hardly need a reminder. Last week, as you know, there was a couple of paragraphs about this job I’m on in two very solid and respectable journals. Today I got a cutting from the Meade Courier quoting them and then recalling the whole of the old story, while three or four days ago there was an illiterate note from some woman in Cornwall saying that her lodger, who had just died, had painted a picture of the ‘lady you shot as a little boy’ and asking me if I would like to buy it as ‘he always said you ought to have it’. No, Judy, once our names are linked together we’d pull a hornet’s nest about our ears, and yet—oh God, my darling, what can we do?”
I put my arm through his possessively.
“Tell me about the woman in Cornwall. The lodger was John Ryder, I suppose?”
“That’s the man.” He held my arm tightly against him as we strode on down the road together. “He was visiting Meade at the time. I don’t really remember him so well as I do his wife, who was a terrifying piece of work, Spanish or something, jealous as the devil. He was quite a well-known painter then, although I can’t say I’ve heard of him since. All the same, it shows you how even disinterested people talk. It must be the element of mystery which fascinates them. Did the wretched child pull the trigger or didn’t it? Unluckily, in this case there never can be any proof.”
“Someone might confess,” I suggested halfheartedly.
“After twenty-five years? It’s not very likely.” His quick smile faded and the long wrinkles appeared on his forehead. “Even so, you know, I think both the police and myself would need more than a mere statement to set all doubt at rest. Proof is the necessary item, Judy, cast-iron irrefutable proof. At this stage in the proceedings it’s just not possible.”
The Allingham Case-Book Page 20