“No. We both went straight upstairs together through the drawing-room door.”
“You went upstairs and into Miss Blake’s bedroom?”
“Yes.”
“How long did you stay there with her?”
“Not more than twenty minutes or half an hour.”
“Why did you go inside her room?”
“For no special reason. We were just talking about – er – business, and I naturally walked in with her to finish the conversation.”
Palk snorted, and Mr. Winkley looked round at him with a smile.
“It’s quite all right, Inspector,” he said. “I believe him. You must remember that it was purely a business arrangement between them. You might not think it, but Harry’s a respectable married man with a decent wife who’s far too good for him. He’s really fond of her, and she hasn’t an idea what his real business is. She thinks he’s a commercial traveller – God help her! – and in a way, I suppose his way of earning a livelihood might pass as that. There wouldn’t be any love-making between Harry and the girl, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“If he’s married to a good woman, why doesn’t he get a decent job and run straight?” asked Palk sententiously.
Mr. Winkley smiled again.
Just habit, Inspector, just habit,” he said indulgently.
It won’t be just habit when he goes up for a stretch for this Lancashire business, will it?” persisted Palk. “How will he prevent his wife knowing what he is then?”
“You needn’t worry, Inspector,” replied Mr. Winkley, “she won’t know. You’ll be ‘sent abroad on a special job,’ won’t you, Harry?”
Harry nodded.
“I should make it America then,” suggested Palk. “It’ll be a long trip.”
“Well,” said Mr. Winkley, returning to his questioning, “when you came out of the bedroom, did you see anyone along the corridor, or standing just inside one of the rooms you passed?”
“No. I looked pretty carefully, too, because I knew what they were in the Hydro for gossip, and it didn’t suit me to make them talk too much about us. That’s why I hadn’t taken much notice of Tony at first, but of course we had plans to make after three months, and I wanted to get some information from her about the men; I got it myself from the old ladies.”
“What did you do after you left Miss Blake?”
“I went straight to bed, just as I told the Inspector.”
“And did you see her again?”
“No. That’s God’s truth!”
Mr. Winkley paused for a moment, then said:
“Why did she give you the jewelry that night? Did you usually keep it for her?”
“No. She didn’t give it to me at all. The maid told me about Tony’s murder when she brought my cup of tea in the morning. As soon as she had gone out of my room, I slipped along to Tony’s bedroom and got the jewel-case. The jewels were part of my stock-in-trade, and I wasn’t going to lose them if I could help it. I’d paid for them, hadn’t I? A pretty penny they cost me, too.”
“Do you mean to tell me,” said Palk, leaning forward in his chair, “that you went into her bedroom while the police were in the house, and stole the jewels?”
The prisoner closed his eyes for a second, in weariness.
“Yes. You were all downstairs. I had to risk it. And I don’t call it stealing to take something which belongs to me.”
“And no one saw you?”
“They would hardly have kept quiet about it if they had, would they?” returned Harry the Punter, and Palk had to admit that, in his experience, they would not.
“You swear that you didn’t murder Miss Blake, Harry?” asked Mr. Winkley.
Harry ran exasperated fingers through hair, which, lacking brilliantine, was no longer shining like that of a painted wooden doll.
“I swear it. I’m telling you the truth.”
“You didn’t quarrel with her?” put in Inspector Palk.
“No. Even if I had quarrelled with her, why should I have murdered her? I’d just have paid her off and hired someone else to do her work. She was a good pal, but there are plenty more like her who would be only too glad to work for me.”
“But if she threatened to tell the truth about you in the Hydro?”
Harry shrugged his shoulders.
“Who would have believed her?” he asked lightly. “No one had anything on me. As Mr. Winkley says, I work slowly. Even if they had cut up rough I should just have paid my bill and left. I never yet met a sucker who squealed out to tell folks what kind of a fool he’d been.”
Palk was convinced by this argument.
“Not till you met Mrs. Entwistle,” he gloated. “Do you know who murdered Miss Blake?”
“Good God, no! Do you think I’d have kept quiet if I had? Of course, the women in the Hydro didn’t like her clothes and lipstick, but you’d want a stronger motive than that for murder, wouldn’t you?”
“Could any of the people in the Hydro have known her before, and had some old grudge to pay?” asked Palk.
The prisoner shook his head.
“No. She’d have told me. It’s the first thing she’d look for in a new hotel. That’s partly why we never arrived together.”
“Can you think of anything, however trifling, which might help us?” asked Mr. Winkley.
“No,” he said emphatically. “I’ve been trying to think since I’ve been locked up here, and I can’t see any sense in it.”
“That’ll be all for the present, Harry,” said Mr. Winkley, rising, “and you might be glad to know that the Blackborough police haven’t got a case against you, in my opinion.”
Harry jumped to his feet.
“But... Mrs. Entwistle...?”
“Another sucker,” replied Mr. Winkley. “So long.”
Palk whistled softly.
“My God,” exclaimed Harry the Punter, “you’ve got a nerve!”
“You’ve nothing to squeal about, my lad,” remarked the Inspector. “You can think yourself lucky not to be standing your trial for murder.”
“But can’t I go, then?” asked the late Sir Humphrey. “You promised you wouldn’t use what I’ve just told you against me. I wouldn’t leave Presteignton.”
“You must go back for a bit,” said Mr. Winkley. “There’s a killer at large, and we don’t want to complicate matters by having you around.”
Chapter 37
“Well, what do you think about it now?” asked Palk, as a burly constable brought in thick buttered toast and strong tea on a tray, after Harry the Punter had returned to his cell.
“He’s innocent,” said Mr. Winkley, “and he’s told the truth.”
“But if he didn’t murder Miss Blake, who did?”
Mr. Winkley waved his hands in the air like a stage money lender.
“It might be anyone. We must go through the evidence again and see if we can find some kind of clue, or we shall have another murder on our hands before we know where we are.”
Palk thought for a minute.
“If Sir Humphrey’s innocent – I shall never remember to call him by any other name – and Matthews is guilty of Miss Marston’s death, perhaps he killed Miss Blake as well,” he suggested.
Mr. Winkley added another lump of sugar to his cup.
“Perhaps,” he admitted, “but it isn’t very satisfactory. He’s connected to Miss Marston by gossip, but not to Miss Blake nor to Bobby. Even if we could attach a motive to him for Miss Blake’s murder, we know he wasn’t responsible for Bobby’s, that is, if that man of yours who shadowed him is to be believed.”
“He’s one of my best men,” said Palk.
“Well, then...”
The Inspector fidgeted a little.
“I’ve been wondering whether I was a bit too hasty in bringing Matthews here,” he said. “I don’t mind confessing that I was rattled at the time. I’ve never seen a kid murdered before, and well... I’m fond of kids. I’ve nothing on Matthews at all except circumstantia
l evidence; the fact that he had been seen about in the car a lot with the Marston girl, and Cox’s evidence that he saw him in the treatment-rooms asking for her...”
“Don’t worry,” Mr. Winkley reassured him. “There are times when it’s good to be a bit hasty, and this might be one of them. Has he made a statement yet?”
Palk sighed.
“No. Jago can’t get a word out of him. I never knew a dumber pair than he and Sir – er – Harry.”
“Let’s assume that he isn’t guilty, for a moment,” suggested Mr. Winkley. “I don’t think that he is, myself.”
Palk could hardly have looked more surprised if Mr. Winkley had produced a rattlesnake from his mouth.
“That’s all very fine,” he said, “but when I say I was hasty in detaining him, I don’t mean that I think there’s any doubt of his guilt, but just that I haven’t enough evidence for a conviction. If he isn’t guilty, why won’t he talk?”
“I think I might guess,” was the reply. “I’d rather like to ask him a few questions.”
The Inspector jabbed at the bell.
Matthews was brought into the room between two policemen, and Palk was struck by the change which had taken place in the man’s appearance since his first interview with him immediately after Winnie Marston’s murder. Then, he had looked smart and immaculately turned out. Now, he looked haggard and unkempt, as if he had slept in his chocolate-coloured uniform for several days. He twisted the gold ring on his little finger and looked at the Inspector with wild eyes. He did not appear to notice Mr. Winkley.
“Sit down,” said Palk. “I want to ask you a few more questions.”
Matthews sat down.
“I’ve nothing to tell you,” he said sullenly.
Mr. Winkley leaned forward.
“Don’t you want us to find your wife’s murderer?” he asked in his clear, quiet voice.
Matthews sprang to his feet, as the previous prisoner had done not long before.
“My...? How do you know?” He tried to recapture the sullen look. “What do you mean? I don’t know what you mean,” he said.
Mr. Winkley smiled wisely.
“Oh yes, you do,” he said, as though Matthews were a naughty child and he were an indulgent father. “You’ve forgotten that you have to sign a register to get married. ‘Albert Matthews, chauffeur, to Winifred Angela Marston, spinster.’ Wasn’t that how it went? You must have realized that the police would find out all about it sooner or later. You’ll save our time and your neck by talking now, Matthews. Now then, Winnie Marston was your wife, wasn’t she?”
“You seem to know,” said Matthews, clenching his hands together till the knuckles were dead white.
After Palk’s first quickly muffled exclamation of astonishment, the room was quiet. Mr. Winkley did not speak. He stared at Matthews with steady eyes.
“Damn you!” shouted Matthews. “You think I killed her! I didn’t, I tell you, I didn’t!”
He sat down suddenly in the chair and buried his face in his hands, drawing in his breath in great, sobbing gulps.
“We don’t think you killed her,” said Mr. Winkley calmly, putting up his hand to check Palk’s protest at being included in this belief.
Matthews dropped his hands and looked up through bloodshot eyes.
“You’ll try to pin it on to me, though,” he said bitterly. “You don’t know who did it, and you don’t care as long as you can pin it on someone.”
“Don’t talk rot,” put in Palk, no longer able to restrain himself from speech. “If you’re really married to Miss Marston you’ve got no motive. The motive would be if you’d got her into trouble and couldn’t marry her.”
Matthews looked quite capable of murder for a moment – if the victim were Palk.
“Don’t talk like that about her,” he shouted. “Miss Marston wasn’t that kind of girl. She wouldn’t go away with me before we were married, though I’d never have let her down.”
“You’re sure you haven’t got a wife already?” persisted Palk.
“I haven’t, damn you!” yelled the chauffeur, and would have hurled himself at the Inspector if the two constables had not held him down on his chair.
“You’re making it very difficult for us, you know,” said Mr. Winkley in soothing tones which sounded more like those of a patient and often-tried family lawyer. It seemed to the Inspector that he had even begun to blink again... he wasn’t at all sure that he liked this play-acting. “Very difficult. We really don’t wish to build up a false case against you, but you are almost forcing us to do so because you won’t give us the help we need to track down the real murderer. Inspector Palk has no desire whatever to insult the memory of your dead wife. He is merely trying to tell you what a wrong impression you are giving us by concealing the truth.”
His voice had the required sedative effect. Matthews took out a handkerchief which, to judge by its colour, served equally as a spare car duster, and wiped the perspiration from his hands and upper lip.
“I’ll tell you all I know,” he said at length. “I might as well, now that you’ve found out so much. I’ll do all I can to help you hang the dirty swine that killed Miss Marston. She was a nice girl.”
Mr. Winkley had a momentary flash of insight into the kind of life Winnie Marston might have led with a husband who called her “Miss,” and thought of her as “a nice girl.”
“You admit, then, that you were married to Miss Marston?”
“Yes. We got married at the Excester Registry Office the day before she was killed. I was supposed to be giving her a driving-lesson, so that anyone might have known we were in the town, without knowing why. It’s a good big town, and no one was likely to see us really.”
“Did you spend the night together?” asked Palk.
“Why, you... you...” stuttered Matthews. “Didn’t I say she was a nice girl?”
“Surely that’s a very natural thing to do after you’re married,” came Mr. Winkley’s soothing voice. “Please answer the Inspector’s question.”
“I’m... sorry. No, we didn’t.”
“Didn’t you mean to live together afterwards?”
“Yes. We were going away together the next day in the car, but she... she was murdered.”
“I see,” nodded Mr. Winkley. “But was there any reason why you were going to wait until the next day? Surely the simplest way would have been to go straight away from the registry office to wherever you intended to go eventually.” Matthews looked up wearily.
“That’s what I thought too,” he explained, “but Miss Marston said the other was a better idea because we could get further away before they found that we’d gone. She was so sure about it that I let her have her own way.”
Millie’s estimation of her sister’s character rang in Palk’s ears. “You don’t know Winnie. She was one of the clinging sort, and if she wanted a thing badly enough she’d get it, whatever anyone else said.”
“Where did you intend to go to if Miss Marston hadn’t been murdered?” asked Mr. Winkley.
A slight smile drifted over Matthews’ face.
“As far as we could get before the boss found we’d pinched his car,” he said. “And now perhaps you’ll see why I didn’t want to talk. The boss has got a devil of a temper, as I dare say you already know, and if he knew I ever meant to clear off with his daughter and his car, there’d be hell to pay. I didn’t mind risking anything if I had her with me, but when that fell through, I thought I might as well keep my job. After all, I’ve got to live, haven’t I? And good jobs don’t grow on every gooseberry bush these days.”
Palk snorted.
“If you’d thought more about keeping your neck,” he said, “you’d have been more helpful to us. Now let’s get down to the truth about the morning when Miss Marston was murdered. Cox said he saw you coming out of the ladies’ treatment-rooms. What were you doing in there?”
“I never went right in,” said Matthews. “I knocked on the door and no one answered, so I just
turned the knob and stepped inside.”
“You had no business to be anywhere near those rooms. What did you go for?”
“I wanted to see Miss Marston. We had arranged to go away at half past eleven. I waited a quarter of an hour, then went to look for her.”
“Because she was fifteen minutes late?” queried Palk. “Isn’t that rather far-fetched? I never yet met a woman who was punctual for an appointment, even if she was running away from home.”
‘‘Miss Marston was always punctual,” said Matthews, “and, you see, the boss had sent word that he wanted the car at half past twelve, so I didn’t know what to do. I thought that perhaps we should have to put off going away till the next day. I never meant to go inside the baths and find her. I thought I could send a message she’d understand, by the nurse.”
“What time did you get to the baths?”
“About ten past twelve. I didn’t go straight there because for a time I’d forgotten that she had said she would be there.”
“Did you see or hear anyone inside there?”
“I didn’t see anyone, but I heard Miss Marston call out, ‘Hello, what are you doing here?’ and I thought at first that she could see me from behind a curtain, though I couldn’t see her. I was just going to reply when I heard a voice from the same place, and guessed that she was talking to someone else.”
“Did you hear any of the conversation?”
“No. Miss Marston had called out a bit loud, or I shouldn’t have heard her to begin with. After that, I couldn’t hear any more words, only the two voices.”
Mr. Winkley leaned eagerly forward.
“You realize, of course, Matthews, that it was almost certainly the murderer whom you heard talking to Miss Marston. Did you recognize the voice at all?” he said.
“No,” replied Matthews after a pause. “I didn’t recognize it, but I thought at the time that it must be Nurse Hawkins.”
“But if you thought that,” said Palk, “why didn’t you wait and give her the message you’d intended to send to Miss Marston?”
“Because I heard footsteps in the corridor and knew I’d get into a row if the boss or the doctor caught me there, so I slipped across to the men’s department and pretended to look for Ted Cox, though I didn’t expect to see him there in the morning.”
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