The Man Who Didn't Fly

by Margot Bennett

  Prudence looked at her angrily, then, in compunction, looked away again. “Don’t worry too much, Hester,” she said awkwardly. “I’ll take the tea up to Father. You wouldn’t like to come swimming?”

  Hester shook her head. She sat, drinking hot tea, considering with dull surprise the death of her emotions. She had no more capacity to feel. She didn’t know how life was to be faced. She put down the tea and went to the sink and washed her face in cold water, thinking sadly there was no way of washing out her mind and making it clean and clear again. The police, she thought, could come and go for ever, asking questions, producing results, assaulting her with each question, destroying her spirit with every answer, taking a technical interest in the nature of the wounds they inflicted: she had no refuge from them, although she had committed no crime.

  She went out of the house and into the garden, hurrying past the bed where the roses grew. It was less than a week since Harry had cut the rosebuds for her, one for every year of her life. She went into the woods and slowly towards the chapel. She sat down on one of the ruined walls, remembering the hour she had spent there with Harry, probing the wound, trying to make it hurt again.

  When she heard a step she looked up, half-afraid that Harry had come back.

  It was Marryatt.

  “Hello,” he said. “I’ve been looking for this place. And I wanted to talk to you again.”

  She nodded mutely. She didn’t want to talk. She had no energy to tell him to go away.

  He sat down in the corner where the two broken walls met, lit a cigarette, and smoked it in silence. She looked at him once or twice, impatiently.

  “You wanted to say something?” she asked.

  “No, not now.”

  “Then what are you doing here?”

  “Just accustoming you to my presence…”

  “Then I’ll go.”

  “No, please. We needn’t talk. I won’t worry you at all.”

  She sat down again. She was too tired to force herself to any kind of action. She drifted slowly into a waking dream of the past. Marryatt was part of it. His presence in the corner was neither remembered nor forgotten, until he stirred and she looked round to see an increased intensity on his face. He was staring across into the far corner of the chapel, and she looked too, and saw the blue paper carton lying there.

  “So this is where Harry ate his lunch,” she said. “It doesn’t matter, does it?”

  “Not if he liked this place,” Marryatt said, still looking intently at the blue paper. “Did he?”

  “Oh, he might have liked it,” she said angrily.

  “And Morgan liked it too? This is where your sister saw Harry and Morgan quarrel, isn’t it?”

  “Questions again,” she said wearily.

  He walked over to the blue paper, looked down at it, bent, and touched it. He pulled one corner of it gently, but it was imprisoned between two stones.

  He stood up again, looking dubiously at Hester, not certain how much she should be asked to hear.

  She walked across to him.

  “So someone’s raised the stone,” she said. “Don’t look like that. You needn’t look like that. It doesn’t mean anything. If you think it does, lift the stone yourself. Go on. Lift it. I’ve more right than you to see.”

  “We’ll go back to your house,” he said quickly. “You’ll come with me, won’t you?”

  She let him take her by the arm. She didn’t listen to anything he said, as they walked back through the woods, but when they reached the house she shook free from him.

  “There’s the telephone,” she said bitterly. She began to walk upstairs, but on the landing she stopped and listened long enough to hear what he had to say to the police. Then she went in her bedroom and locked the door.

  When the police came and raised the stone and descended into the six-foot deep vault, they found all that was left of Harry. He had been shot in the chest, and one hand still lay protectively over the wound.

  At first they thought there was nothing in the vault but Harry and the decaying wooden coffins. When they raised him they found a few scattered flower petals; colourless, shrivelled nearly to the heart, but still with a vestige of the soft bloom of the living rose.

  They searched the vault, but nowhere in the disturbed dust was any proof that the Sackford diamonds had ever lain there.

  Proof (2)

  Inspector Lewis, confronted with murder instead of an irritating problem about missing persons, looked like a marble statue of himself. If he had any feeling of indulgence or sympathy for interfering civilians, he calcified it instantly. He had made it known he wanted to see Hester, and he waited for Hester to be produced.

  “I’m sorry,” Marryatt said. “You can’t see her. She’s not feeling like that.”

  Lewis looked at Marryatt as though he was measuring him for the gallows.

  “She’s told you everything she knows. She can’t add to it.”

  “I don’t accept your authority,” Lewis snapped. “I’m prepared to see you later. I don’t want to see you now.”

  “Oh, come,” Marryatt said gently. “I’m the man who put you on to this. I knew there was something about that chapel. I guessed things might have worked out that way.”

  “What way?”

  “I thought maybe Morgan might have won the battle with Harry.”

  “So that’s your opinion. Morgan. I might have supposed you’d jump to the easy conclusion.”

  Marryatt’s manner of careless arrogance didn’t change. “He was the man who’d hidden the diamonds. He was the man who went to the chapel on Thursday morning, quarrelled with Harry, threatened him. Harry brought out the gun then: he knew about the gun. He was the man who was in such a state of despair on Friday morning that he frightened even Prudence. He told her, didn’t he, that the plane was his only chance?”

  “Mr Marryatt, I can do my own guessing. Your views are of no importance. You hadn’t even met Morgan Price.”

  Marryatt made a quick step forward. His dark brows were drawn together, and his eyes were very bright. He was a bigger man than the inspector, and he looked for a moment as though he was going to ignore the immunity of office. Then he drew back again and smiled with the maximum of unfriendliness.

  “I’m asking you to get this straight before you see Miss Wade, or her father. They’ve had enough. They’ve lived a sheltered life for five hundred years. Now, you listen to me. As I see it, Morgan, who’d been dithering about all night, finally came down, to this room, and found the gun lying on the table where I left it. Then he went out, found Harry in the vault, and shot him.”

  “Throwing a rose on the body for remembrance?” Lewis suggested coldly. “Thank you, Mr Marryatt. Now I want to see Miss Wade.”

  Marryatt, scowling, sat down on the arm of a chair. “I have no way of stopping you.”

  “It won’t be necessary for you to be present, Mr Marryatt. You may wait in another room, if you wish.”

  Marryatt’s wishes showed clearly enough in his face, but he stood up and walked out of the room.

  He met Hester in the hall.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I couldn’t stop it.”

  She passed him without listening, and went into the room where the police waited. She sat down, ignoring them entirely, maintaining the appearance of a woman who had her own reality, and would admit no other.

  “Miss Wade, I’ve asked you to come because you are the only person concerned who can be relied on to tell us what we want to know.”

  She nodded, still examining her own thoughts, not interested in the police and their questions.

  “Was Morgan Price wearing a rose in his button-hole, that Thursday night?”

  “No.”

  “Could you think carefully about that?”

  She closed her eyes, calling up a vision of Morgan�
�s tortured face. She had seen him before dinner, she had seen him again when Maurice lay unconscious and she thought he was dead.

  “No, he wasn’t wearing a rose.”

  “Was he the kind of man who would wear a button-hole? Had he ever, to your knowledge, worn one?”

  “Never.”

  “Was Harry wearing a button-hole that night?”

  Her face twitched a little at the mention of Harry’s name.

  “No. But you had better ask Mrs Ferguson, hadn’t you?” she said with sudden passion. “He saw her last, didn’t he?”

  “And your father didn’t wear a button-hole? No, I thought not. Now Maurice Reid wore the rose you gave him in the morning in the garden, when you appealed to him not to take your father’s money. He was still wearing it, when you left him here, in this room, late on Thursday night. You said so, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, he was still wearing it.”

  “And there was this scene in this room here, when Harry fixed the roses on Jackie’s shirt?”

  “Yes, I remember that,” she said, her voice quivering. “Please, need we go on?”

  “I’m afraid we must. Would you say that Jackie resented being made the butt of Harry’s humour?”

  “I didn’t notice.”

  “Then Mr Ferguson drew your attention to the special type of rose he was wearing in his button-hole?”

  “Yes.”

  “So three people, Joseph Ferguson, Maurice Reid, and this Jackie, all wore roses that night.” He made the statement flatly. “This Marryatt, what about him?”

  Hester looked up. “Marryatt? I can’t remember. I don’t think so, but I can’t remember. What are you trying to find out? What have roses to do with this?”

  “There were petals, quite a lot of petals, in the vault,” Inspector Lewis said harshly. “I want you to try to remember if Marryatt wore a rose.”

  “I’ve had enough of this,” Hester said on a note of repugnance. “I can’t go on. Why should Marryatt wear a rose, just to oblige you in your search for a victim? You sit there, destroying us all, because you want to have your case tidied up, and put away in a box file. I didn’t know the police were like this! And you,” she said, turning on Sergeant Young, “pretending to be a pianist, to like Bach, to be a human being like everyone else. It’s a lie.”

  “Please keep calm, Miss Wade. That’s all we wish to ask you. Your sister has supplied the rest of the evidence. I’m afraid it may be necessary to see her again and to take a statement from her. If she confirms what she has already told us,” he added in a kinder voice, “the case will be settled, beyond any reasonable doubt.”

  Hester stood up to go, her glance resting pitifully on the roses.

  “Prudence is only sixteen. I can’t agree that she should be left alone with you, to make a statement on murder,” she said, her voice wincing away from the final word.

  “You would like your father to be present?”

  “Father is not well. He’s suffering from shock. I’ll stay.”

  “As you wish,” Inspector Lewis said indifferently. He wasn’t in any way interested in the limits of her endurance. For the present he was concerned with only one problem, and until that had been settled, no others existed for him.

  Prudence came in. Her hair was still wet from swimming, and there were two damp channels on her cheeks. She looked in terror, not at the detectives, but at her sister.

  “Oh, Hester, I’m sorry I said all those things. I liked him so much. I did, truly. I’m so sorry. What can I do?”

  Hester walked quickly over to the table where the roses languished, and stood, fingering the fallen petals, picking them up one by one, crushing them, until her fingers were wet.

  “There’s nothing you can do,” she said, still standing with her back to the room. “Tell them what they want to know.”

  “We want you to describe, in your own words, what this man Jackie, Jackie Daw, if that’s what he called himself, looked like when you saw him on Friday morning. I want you to think very carefully, because it’s possible your words may be used as evidence. In fact, we want to take them down.”

  “All right,” Prudence said. She looked guiltily at Hester’s back. “I didn’t see Jackie on Friday morning when I went into the kitchen. So I came in here, to the sitting-room, and he was sort of standing around, with a duster. He was wearing that dreadful flowered shirt. I don’t know if you heard about it before, but it looked as though he’d bought it at a jumble sale on the Gold Coast. It was all colours of flowers, and he still had two rosebuds pushed in it, that Harry put in the night before. You know. And he was looking kind of pale and underprivileged and underfed, the way he always did. I don’t know about his trousers. I don’t remember what they looked like. Then I saw him again at breakfast, and he said:”

  “I don’t want to hear what he said,” Inspector Lewis interrupted.

  “Well, Hester said at breakfast, ‘You’re still wearing your roses, Jackie, were you up all night?’”

  “I don’t want to hear that either. Your sister may make a separate statement about his appearance.”

  “All right. Then I was in here cutting out a frock. I wanted to ask him if he could tango, but I expect that’s another thing you don’t want to hear again. I must say, I do think you’re trying to have it both ways,” she added candidly. “You’ve heard all this already, and now officially you’re not hearing it.”

  “Confine yourself to what you saw,” Inspector Lewis said.

  “Then that’s practically nothing. No, wait, I saw him take off the roses and throw them in the wastepaper basket. They are probably still there, because I haven’t emptied it. And I saw him go away. He was wearing his pullover then, and carrying a paper shopping bag. I thought he was going to the village, but of course he must have been going away with his things.”

  “But he didn’t have any things,” Sergeant Young pointed out quickly. He looked down again at his notebook. “Shall I go back to the station and get this transcribed, sir?”

  “No, copy it now.”

  While Sergeant Young wrote the statement, Lewis went to the wastepaper basket and shook out its contents. The two withered roses lay among the old papers and empty cigarette packets. He picked them up and put them away carefully, and then waited until the sergeant had handed over the statement and Prudence had signed it. He took the statement and folded it slowly, almost lovingly, as a hunter might unconsciously caress his gun.

  “Then?” Hester asked.

  He turned on her, smiling almost indulgently. He was a human being again. “Miss Wade, you look tired,” he said in solicitous tones, that, after what had gone before, failed to convince. “We needn’t trouble you any more today.”

  “You can’t go like this. You have no right to. We are the people most concerned. Perhaps we are the only people who care at all about him. You can’t leave us like this, not knowing.”

  “We police must be allowed our little secrets, you know,” he said, beaming at her.

  “You said it wasn’t Morgan, because he wasn’t wearing a rose. You said it couldn’t be Jackie, because he still had those roses in the morning. You’re leaving us to suppose that Uncle Joe or Maurice must have—have done what was done. If that’s not true, then you must tell us, and not leave us to think evil thoughts of the dead.” She spoke with a conviction that made her seem sadly ingenuous.

  Inspector Lewis allowed his expression to slip almost to the edge of compassion, to the slopes that are too dangerous for officialdom to tread.

  “I’m issuing a warrant for Jackie’s arrest,” he said. “I wish I could be sure about his other name being Daw.”

  The rose petals that Hester still held floated softly to the ground and settled there before she spoke.

  “But he—we’ve sworn that he still had his roses in the morning.”

  “That�
�s almost the whole point, Miss Wade. He had his roses in the morning, although we think he left them, or most of them, in that vault. We shan’t know exactly what happened there, until we get him. There may have been a struggle. Enough of a struggle, anyway, to make someone’s button-hole, or the petals from it, fall off. He wouldn’t have noticed at the time that they’d gone, but he certainly noticed it afterwards. He wouldn’t want to go back there, searching for rose petals.”

  “But how do you know it was Jackie?” Prudence said in exasperation. “He wasn’t the only one with a button-hole.”

  “The others were wearing only one rose. And, you see, you have the evidence in this room that it was Jackie. There are only sixteen roses in that vase, as Sergeant Young noticed earlier,” he said in a voice which contained only a careful measure of approval.

  The sergeant moved forward eagerly. “There were twenty, Miss Wade. You—he—I mean you watched them being picked, one for every year of your life, he said. And you noticed when he gave Jackie two of them. Eighteen left. No one else touched them, so far as you know. In the morning Jackie stayed long enough to flaunt the fact that he still had two roses. He was shrewd enough, in his way, but quite blinded by his own shrewdness, or he’d have taken his substitute roses from the garden, and not left the vase here with only sixteen.”

  Inspector Lewis sat still, looking as though he would like to bite his fingernails. “That’s enough,” he said impatiently. “There are no more facts we can give you. Only theories. It’s possible that Harry found the place where Morgan Price was hiding those jewels he may have stolen. It’s possible he went there late at night with the idea of getting these jewels and delivering them up to the insurance company. It’s possible that this Jackie, quite independently spying on Morgan Price, also discovered the hiding-place. The brooch he produced earlier in the evening certainly suggests this. It’s possible that when Jackie had made his plans he went back to this vault and found Harry there already. All that will have to wait till we get him. It won’t take long. We get a lot of co-operation when we need it. The first of the Sackford diamonds that comes on that market will be the end of your Jackie.”