She had brought with her a large envelope, addressed to herself at home, and ready stamped. Into this she put the envelope containing the photographs. In the hall she put on her macintosh again, belted it up very short and on her high-heeled shoes wibble-wobbled herself out of the side door again and into the rainy evening.
She had marked a convenient pillar-box between her home and the office. She now returned to it and there posted the envelope; in a dark corner behind it, let down the macintosh to its full length, took off the plastic hood, dried it carefully and rolled it away in its little plastic case. The handbag had been chosen, long in advance, to accommodate a folding umbrella. In her own image again, without the furtiveness and certainly without the wibble-wobble, she returned to Mr. Bindell’s office; tried the front door, put on a puzzled air, went round to the side door at last—went in, shaking the wet umbrella, called up the stairs, mounted to Mr. Bindell’s door—shrieked like any startled woman upon seeing the blood-stained figure sprawled across the desk, ran to him, made such futile attempts as anyone might make to do something, anything… Pushed aside the horrid black gun, picked up the plastic with fastidious finger-tips and quickly dropped it again; at last picked up the telephone…(‘Well, I may just have touched things—if there are any fingerprints on them, then I must have, but I was so shocked I hardly knew what I was doing… And blood, yes, there may be blood on me, on my clothes—but I did try to lift his head, I did handle the blood-spattered telephone….’) Meanwhile, however, she contented herself with dialling the police. ‘Do please come quickly! It’s dreadful. Yes, Mr. Bindell—you know, the solicitor. Yes, I came to see him on business—the papers are right here on his desk; he said to drop in any time, he’d be working late…’
The investigations took simply ages. It was not for several months that widowed Mrs. Hartley felt the time ripe to call upon widowed Mrs. Bindell. ‘I thought I should have a word with you about Linda’s acceptance to Hallfield School.’
‘That matter comes up before the Board on Tuesday,’ said Mrs. Bindell—by this time well back in harness.
‘Then Linda will start with Joy next term,’ said Louisa—and it was a statement.
‘If we decide to admit her,’ said Mrs. Bindell.
‘I think you’ll decide to admit her all right,’ said Louisa. She produced a large envelope and slid out a couple of glossy black and white prints. ‘Disgusting, aren’t they?’
‘Where on earth—?’ cried Mrs. Bindell, absolutely shocked.
‘That night I found your husband dead,’ said Louisa. ‘I told the police that I touched nothing in his office, Mrs. Bindell, but that wasn’t quite true. He had evidently been taken by surprise when the murderer came: this—filth—was spread out on the blotter in front of him.’ Mrs. Bindell opened her mouth as though to speak but shut it again. ‘I happened to have a large handbag and I gathered the things up and brought them away with me. I thought,’ said Louisa, limpidly, ‘that you wouldn’t care for them to be found by anyone else. No one wants a scandal; and you, with all the work you do in this town—Board of Governors at Hallfield, for example—you’d be particularly susceptible, wouldn’t you?’ Mrs. Bindell tried again to speak and again fell silent. ‘You’re going to suggest perhaps,’ said Louisa, ‘that I can’t prove that these pictures belonged to him? But these people—well, pore over this kind of stuff, so I’ve been told: sort of gloating over it, you know: and this glossy paper will be covered with his fingerprints.’
Mrs. Bindell seemed to think about it, sitting in a saggy heap, all the bounce and arrogance gone from her. She said at last, arriving surprisingly quickly on the whole at a proper conclusion: ‘How much shall I have to pay?’
Louisa had handed over two thousand pounds to Mr. Bindell. Say another thousand for pain and stress, not to mention what might, she supposed, be called ‘danger money’. ‘I’ll take three thousand down,’ she said. ‘That’s to settle—well, a kind of debt. And then of course there’s the matter of Linda getting into Hallfield. After that…’ She shrugged. ‘I’m not hard up, Mrs. Bindell; financially I shall be quite safe—now. So it won’t be a matter of cash. Just as long as my Linda gets along happily and successfully in Sanstone. Of course the right school is going to help, and then she and Joy might take some course together, modelling or whatever it is they’ll have set their hearts on by then; and of course knowing the right people helps too, and going to all the parties…’ She returned the envelope to her bag. ‘The secret will be safe with me,’ she said. ‘I don’t go to Rotary lunches or get drunk in pubs.’ And she fastened the bag with a snap and got up to leave. ‘Monday afternoon, perhaps, you could drop the money in at my house?—when you call to invite me to run a stall at the bazaar you’re organising for Lady William. I’ve never been asked even to help there; and though to be honest I don’t think I’ve missed much, still, everybody else goes and I’d like to know Lady William. I believe her children are charming, and the boy’s about three years older than my Linda… One never knows, does one?’ She thought it over for a moment, puzzled. ‘Now what exactly would his title be?’
‘The Honourable,’ said Mrs. Bindell, flat voiced.
‘It’s going to be a great help,’ said Louisa, ‘having you to help me over little things like that.’
Linda and Joy were skipping again, Roy being up at the house ‘key-holing’. He joined them, breathless, and seized up the rope. He addressed his song to Linda.
‘Cod, skate, sturgeon, shark—
Your mother’s on the blackmail lark!
Whale, walrus and sea-cow—
She’s got the feelthy peectures now!
‘No?’ said Linda.
‘Yes, she has,’ said Roy. He went on skipping.
‘Sea, lake, river, pool—
So you’re going to Hallfield School.’
‘No?’ cried Linda and Joy, together this time, excitedly. ‘Yes, you are; and what’s more,’ said Roy, skipping again—
‘Men and horses, hare and hounds—
You’re going to get three thousand pounds,
And go around with Joy and me
And marry the ar-is-toc-racy…’
He stopped skipping altogether and they all rolled about with laughter, hugging one another triumphantly.
‘Well, honestly, can you believe it?’ said Linda, when at last they stopped, exhausted. ‘Grown-ups!’
‘What a flap if any of us so much as cheats a bit at school!’
‘I suppose this means that it really was my mother who shot your father?’
‘Of course it was,’ said Roy. ‘She knew these floozies had been going to his office after hours—all Sanstone knew it. Just hoicked up her skirt and looked like a teenager trying to walk like Marilyn Monroe. The police thought some boy-friend or father or someone had been watching, and went in and did for him. Of course they knew nothing about the blackmail.’ He exchanged a suddenly exultant glance with his sister. It might some day be profitable to be the only ones in the world who knew that Mrs. Hartley was a murderess.
Linda saw nothing of the glance. ‘It’s jolly decent of you to take it like this.’
‘Oh, well, we didn’t like him very much, did we, Roy?’
‘We don’t like any grown-ups very much,’ said Roy.
‘And I must say, considering that he was blackmailing her with the Feelthy Peectures after my father died—he did deserve what he got.’
‘M’m. On the other hand,’ said Roy, ‘your father had been blackmailing him with them for years. So it was really only tit for tat.’ And he caught up one end of the rope and Joy caught up the other and Linda flew into the middle; and as they turned and skipped, they all three gaily sang,
‘Tit for tat and knick for knack—
The biter bit the biter back.
Hound hunts fox and fox hunts hound—
Oh, what a merry old merry-go-round!’
Upon Reflection
THE RAIN HAD STOPPED. Mrs. Dorinda Jones sat
back, very small and exquisite in the corner of her taxi cab, fastidiously holding her damp umbrella. The traffic was jammed solid but she was sufficiently entertained (between uneasy glances at the steadily ticking meter) by contemplation of a rather divine pair of boots in a shop across the road—and the new nursing home in process of completion, a little ahead and to the left of her.
The nursing home was being financed by Arab oil, a magnificent edifice apparently hewn from a block of gleaming black marble, with lots of lovely curlicues in what was doubtless solid gold. She was amused to observe with what opportunist haste a very grand new restaurant had been opened next door to it—apparently for an Arab clientele, for dozens of white-robed gentlemen were at this very moment pouring out, evidently from some celebration luncheon. The commissionaire, enormously impressive in scarlet coat, peaked cap and prodigious brass buttons, was dashing from the door of one magnificent car to another, crumpling into a white cotton palm the unconsidered five and even ten pound notes.
One of the Arab gentlemen, Mrs. Jones recognised as Sheik Horror-horror. Well, she called him that to herself—one read these foreign names in the papers and never got around to actually pronouncing them. And a proper horror he seemed to be, rich as Croesus but grinding away at the faces of the poor, back home in Where-ever-it-was, and well known to have slain off all sorts of nice, harmless people, including several wives and even a couple of expendable sons, who had stood between himself and some monstrous coup or other. Mrs. Dorinda Jones is an ardent, if not very accurate, follower of the more sensational items of world news.
A small gap had opened in the traffic and her taxi moved forward a few yards. She diverted her gaze to the boots in the shop opposite which now more clearly came into view—and when she looked round again, one of the magnificent cars had crept up beside them, between herself and the new building: the curlicues seemed to be Arab writing after all. And Sheik Horror-horror was on a level with her, lying back in a corner of the Rolls, his hands folded in the lap of his flowing white gown. His eyes were closed but he opened them for a moment, gave her a baleful glare, and closed them again. But what was really most peculiar, thought Mrs. Jones, was that he now had with him in the car the most extraordinary companion. The Rolls was on the V.I.P. pattern, with glass cutting off the driver’s seat from the driven; and behind the glass two little tip-up, forward-facing seats, such as young princes are wont to perch upon, on Royal occasions. And on one of the seats, staring straight ahead of him was a rough looking man—not an Arab, a white man, a good old Cockney type he looked, middle-aged, with a sharp profile, untidy dark hair and, from what she could glimpse of it, a cheap, rather shabby old jacket. A bodyguard? But what a strange sort of bodyguard to be chosen!—and anyway, Sheik Horror-horror was known to disdain any sort of protective entourage—a man so universally detested (he might well consider) would be unable to rely upon anyone at all and might as well just trust to himself. There were other reasons also, she was to learn, for his preferring to travel unattended. Not pretty reasons at all—if ever there was a born murderee, Sheik Horror-horror was it.
And so indeed it was to prove. That very evening, there was headline news—the chauffeur had driven up to the palatial mansion somewhere outside Ascot, and the welcome-home party, scurrying out to open the door and usher His Excellency forth, had discovered him slumped all anyhow in his corner, with a dagger plunged into his back.
The chauffeur’s name was Smith, an Englishman; and by the following morning, Smith found himself in the situation known as ‘helping the police with their enquiries.’ The Sheik had been seen off from the restaurant alive and well, the way home passed through some quiet countryside and Smith had confessedly been alone in the car with him all that time. The weapon proved to have been a knife of Arabic design, used universally both as weapon and decoration. It bore no finger-prints.
Mrs. Dorinda Jones lapped up every word of it. But… ‘Alone in the car with him…’ ‘How very odd!’ said Mrs. Jones to herself and she rang up a very grand person at Scotland Yard—Mrs. Jones knows simply everyone—and said: ‘But what about the rough looking man?’
The chauffeur, Smith, received the information about the rough looking man with passionate gratitude. His own position was dicey in the extreme. Blood had been found on his hands and uniform—he had of course helped to get the body out of the car—and he’d never made a secret and therefore could make none now, of his fear and loathing of his employer. Certainly he had admitted to having seen no intruder, rough looking or otherwise; but the car had been crawling through the traffic, frequently at a standstill—and the glass partition was sound-proof and opaque; perfectly possible for someone to have entered and left the car, without his being aware of it. ‘He did a lot of talking business in the back of that car, sir,’ said Smith, earnestly explaining to the police. ‘And—other things.’
He had been with the Sheik for several years, living in a lodge in the grounds of the mansion and driving the Rolls whenever His Excellency was in England. A cushy job—yes, indeed—except when His Excellency was in England. Not a considerate employer, the suspect quite frankly confided: ill-tempered, intemperate and bullying and downright diabolical to those poor bastards he’d bring with him when he came over from Where-ever-it-was—it had made Smith’s blood boil to see it. And one habit he’d had…‘He’d pick up these poor girls, sir, in some night club or other and drive them home—even through the soundproof glass, I’ve heard the screams. And then I’d be got up at any hour of the night to drive them back where they belonged. More dead than alive some of them, poor little creatures; I swear it used to make me sick.’
‘Not so sick that you thought of telling the police?’
But Smith had seen what happened to those few wretches who had ever dared to rebel against Sheik Horror-horror; and you could get away and hide at the ends of the earth, his thugs would still find you out. Besides….‘Poor kids, they’d hired theirselves out, sir, hadn’t they? And been paid. Paid fortunes, sir. And taken the money. Gone wrong in life, poor little devils,’ said Smith, ‘and lost their way and come to this.’
M’m. Mr. Smith wouldn’t by any chance have a daughter himself, who had lost her way in life—?
‘Me, sir?’ said Smith. He drew himself up. ‘Do I look like a man who could have a daughter fallen to such depths as that?’
But he’d forgotten, confided her highly placed friend to Mrs. Jones, that he wasn’t now wearing a smart uniform and peaked cap; in mufti, any man might look as though he could have had a daughter gone wrong. Which could have been a motive—
‘But what about my rough looking man?’ insisted Mrs. Jones. ‘I mean that must let him out?’
And in fact it did. The cab driver was sought and found, and conceded that, though he’d been looking ahead, watching the traffic, he might just have caught out of the corner of his eye, a glimpse of the rough looking man in the Rolls. The police sighed heavily and said goodbye to Mr. Smith. No one, not even back home in Where-ever-it-was, as Mrs. Jones would have said—was anything but delighted that Sheik Horror-horror had got his just deserts. It was highly embarrassing to the British Government, all the same. The police are understood to be keeping a sharp eye out to this day for Mrs. Dorinda Jones’ rough looking man.
Mr. Smith, however, in an ecstasy of gratitude, approached Mrs. Jones with a large—if rather ill-assorted—bunch of flowers. He had now joined a car-hire firm and any time Mrs. Jones wanted to do a bit of shopping—that would be on the house. Mrs. Jones accepted with simple delight and upon their first excursion suggested driving past the scene of the crime: there had been a rather divine pair of boots in the window of a shop, and she wondered if they might not still be there.
At the Arab restaurant, the lunch time rush had not yet begun and the commissionaire came forward hopefully when the traffic halted their car outside its doors. He seemed to recognize her—Mrs. Jones is highly photogenic and her pictures had vied in the papers with Identikit portraits of the roug
h looking man—and his large, florid face took on a rather strange tinge of grey. ‘How odd!’ thought Mrs. Jones. ‘Just a minute,’ she said to Smith, and stepped out of the opened door. ‘You’ve given up your nice white cotton gloves,’ she said to the commissionaire.
He went greyer still. ‘I found that they showed the dirt, Madam.’
‘And stains? But if they got stained, you could take them off and stuff them into a pocket. And then of course, there’s the question of fingerprints.’ She looked at him very kindly. ‘Have you by any chance got a young daughter?’ she said.
His hands were beginning to shake: it was horrible. ‘I had a daughter, Madam,’ he said. ‘She’s dead now. She died in hospital of—injuries.’ He pulled himself together. ‘The police asked me these questions, Mrs. Jones. It was you, yourself, who told them that when you saw him in the car driving away from here—the Sheik was alive and well.’
‘He was alive,’ said Mrs. Jones. ‘I wouldn’t know about well. He did open his eyes, it’s true, and looked at me. But—I ought to have realised it before—not at all the look that a gentleman all that keen on girls might be expected to give one. A terrible look—almost as though… Well, almost as though I’d stabbed him in the back. Or someone had stabbed him in the back. Then his eyes closed again.’
A silence. He said at last: ‘What will you do?’
‘I’ll have to think about it,’ said Mrs. Jones. ‘I mean—there’s one’s duty and all that. But I’d let you know first.’ She got back into the car, but before he closed the door on her, she leaned out and put her small, gloved hand on his arm. ‘I’m very, very sorry about your daughter,’ she said.
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