Heads You Lose (19 page)

A
YOUNG MAN SAT
dejectedly upon the narrow bed in a cell at the police-station at Torrington, his head in his hands. For nearly six months now he had been driving himself to confess to the murder of Lily Baines, that night last summer, in the little copse; and now he was here and had confessed and nobody would believe him. He had met her in Torrington in a shelter, the time they had the false air-raid alarm; he had looked after her and seen her on to her bus when it was all over, and she had promised to meet him again. She had said she was a seckerterry to a rich lady in Pigeonsford village; he had read afterwards in the papers that she had only been a kitchen-maid—but, anyway, seckerterry or kitchen-maid, he had fallen in love with her, really in love, nothink wrong about it, and after several meetings in Torrington he had made an assignation with her one night in the little wood near where she worked. She had arrived there with a young man who had kissed her and gone away. She had explained that this was her brother; but afterwards, when he had asked her to marry him, she had confessed that it was not her brother at all, but her steady; that they had been walking out for two years; that all this had meant nothing to her but a couple of dates for the flicks and a meat tea at the Regal Palais. She said she had told nobody about their meetings, because she was afraid of her steady finding out. She had gone on and on talking. He did not know what she had said after that, for something had gone very funny inside him, like a sharp knife cutting slowly, with a sickly warmth, into his very flesh… Then he had seen the scythe leaning up against a tree, near the churchyard wall; she must have read in his eyes that he was going to kill her, for she had begun to be frightened and to plead with him and beat him off with her hands; he had put his arm round her and held her still, taken off her belt with the other hand and tied her with it. After—it—was all over, he had found her brooch in his hand. It was a cross of diamonds and rubies; he had given it to her himself, and it had cost three-and-eleven. He had laid it very gently on her breast, reverent like. The gentlemen must believe that he had been sorry by then for what he had done. He had never meant her no harm. He had never been in love before.

“You’re telling lies,” said Cockrill.

“I’m not, sir,” said the young man earnestly, for having taken this great and terrible decision, it was dreadful to be in suspense all over again as to whether or not he would be hanged for a murderer. “As true as I’m here I killed the girl, and I laid her down at the foot of the tree, and I put that there cross on her chest to show I was sorry, like…”

“The brooch was lying crooked on her breast, with the pin upwards,” said Cockrill sardonically. “That doesn’t sound much like reverence, does it? You’re telling lies, my son.”

The family up at Pigeonsford were lingering over after-dinner coffee. Cockrill sat down gloomily at the end of the table and accepted a cup. “That fellow we’re holding at the station—he’s a fraud. Out for sensation or notoriety, I suppose.”

“He
didn’t
kill the girl in the copse?”

“No. He’s telling lies.”

Hope lit up their faces. “Then the original murderer may still be loose? There may still be an outside person to have killed Miss Morland and Pippi…?”

“I never believed otherwise,” said Lady Hart austerely.

“Oh, but Gran, it looked so pec
u
liar. I mean, this man might have killed Miss Morland, but of course he had given himself up by the time poor Pippi… It was too much to hope for two maniacs, one to be in gaol and one to be murdering Pippi; you must say it was
too
much coincidence. It had to be one of us.”

“Fran—don’t say such things!” said Pendock.

“Well, but it’s all right to say them now. Of course, if this man’s just a loony, wanting publicity, then the original murderer’s still at large, and he killed Pippi and Miss Morland, and there’s nothing more for us to worry about.” She got up and poured out more coffee for Cockrill, leaning over his chair. “How are you so sure this man’s telling lies, Cockie darling?”

“He’s been adding a bit too much embroidery, like they always do,” said Cockie crossly, for several potential suspects in the bush were a lot less satisfactory than one in the hand. “He’d read it up in the papers and he’d got it all pat; but he slipped up on one small detail about the brooch, which he need never have mentioned at all.” He looked at Pendock over the rim of his coffee-cup. “You remember the brooch? A vulgar little red-and-white cross?”

“I wish I could forget it,” said Pendock sadly. “I picked it up while I was waiting with Brown, for you and the police-surgeon. You know how it is, one has these unaccountable impulses—I stooped and picked it up off her body and held it in my hand. There was blood on it: for weeks I felt as though I could never wash it off.”

“You picked it up?” said Cockrill, putting down his cup with a rattle in its saucer.

“Yes. It didn’t matter, did it? I put it back again immediately.”

“When you say you put it back—you just threw it down on to the girl’s body?”

Pendock looked grieved. “Well, not exactly threw it; but I did just drop it back, rather hastily. I was so shocked to find the blood on my hands.”

“And how was it lying when you saw it first?” asked Cockie, leaning forward intently.

“It was lying in the middle of the girl’s breast, quite neatly: the right way up and the long end pointing toward her feet. Now that I come to think of it, it looked as though it had been placed there like that, because it w
as
a cross. It never occurred to me before: should I have mentioned it at the time? Is it important?”

“It depends what you call important: it’s going to hang a man,” said Cockrill, and got up and left the room.

They gazed at each other in stricken silence. Pendock put his head in his hands. Fran said defiantly: “So it
was
one of us!”

“Oh, Fran darling, don’t.”

“Well, we were all quite ready to admit that that was the only alternative, when we thought the ‘outside’ person was at large; but now we’re involved in it all over again.”

Lady Hart leant her head on the palm of her hand. “Where’s it all going to end? When will it all be over…?”

“It had better be over pretty soon,” said James comfortably. “I’m supposed to be in the Army, even if I
don’t
know which hand to salute with, and they’ll be getting restive if I’m away much longer. You people don’t seem to realise it, but it’s a dreadful thing for an officer and a gentleman to be running around the countryside like a hunted thing, with detectives at his heels.”

“Not running, darling. Bicycling.”

“No mockery from you, Venetia,” said James severely. He held out a piece of walnut to Aziz. “I wouldn’t touch it, old boy. It’s German!”

Aziz immediately ate up the piece of walnut and looked for more. “There you are—he
does
n’t do it!”

“He does it for us,” said Fran indignantly. She proffered a hazel nut, saying in a sharp, high voice: “It’s German!”

Aziz advanced resolutely upon the hazel nut. “It’s British,” cried Venetia, just in time. They fell into ecstasies at his cleverness.

James, having brought a smile back to the eyes of his beloved, relapsed into a torpor. Henry, however, was not so easily to be balked of a nice round discussion. He said thoughtfully: “If we could only prove that Pippi could have been killed after the snow stopped falling.”

“It wouldn’t make any difference,” said Fran immediately.

“It might. Suppose we could find a way that it could have been done, and then show that it
had
been done that way, then it would prove that none of us could have been involved, because of course the house was full of policemen from midnight onwards, after it stopped snowing.”

“It
is
a point, darling.”

Henry got to his feet. “What about all going down to the scene of the crime?”

“And letting poor Bunsen clear away,” said Lady Hart. As they humped themselves into overcoats, scarves and furs, she added quietly to James: “Do you hate this? Would you rather we didn’t go?”

James looked surprised. “No, I don’t mind. Because Pippi was my wife, you mean?” He gave himself away a little by adding: “I think it’s best to look the thing right in the face; no use pretending that it hasn’t happened. One has to try and be sort of—impersonal.”

“It relieves their nerves,” she said, looking after the girls as they walked across the grass between Henry and Pendock. “This is rather a nightmare for ordinary people, James dear; and if they didn’t make a sort of hectic game of it, I think we’d all go mad. That’s the reason Henry’s doing it; and that’s why I rather encourage them…”

“Don’t mind me,” said James, but without bitterness.

Henry was saying, looking about him eagerly: “All we have to do is show Cockrill that it could have been done.”

Fran, her hand tucked into Pendock’s arm, peered out from under her scarlet hood: “Well, go on, darling. You show!”

“What’ll you bet I can’t?”

Lady Hart advanced with James, and halted on the banks of the little stream, beyond the summer-house. “Henry dear, curb your propensity for money-making, and give us a straightforward explanation, if you’ve got one to give, which I don’t for a moment believe. And just bear in mind that after all Pippi was James’s wife.

Henry’s warm Jewish heart overflowed with remorse. “I’m so sorry, James, old boy. I—it’s all such a muck, Cockie telling us that the murderer
is
caught and then that he
is
n’t, and one’s nerves get jangled up and one forgets that after all this is a terribly personal matter. Let’s call it off; I’ll work it out some other time.”

James wished that people would not keep reminding him that Pippi had been his wife, and that, somehow or other, he seemed to have let her down. It was hard for Fran too. He knew that, under her brittle raillery, she was hurt by every reference that he had been in love with someone else, had married someone else. He took her arm and said, in his careless drawl: “Let’s pretend we’re investigating the murder of someone none of us knew. I owe Pippi something because she was once, long ago, my wife; so we’ll leave her out of it altogether, and Henry will convey an inanimate object—a bag of golf-clubs or an overcoat or something—to the summer-house, and come away again, leaving no traces on what ought to be the snow… as I suppose that’s what he’s going to prove he can do…”

Constable Troot obligingly returned to the house for a great-coat, and, with sundry dark hints, borrowed from the cook a long, stout piece of rope. “Who can cope with a lasso?” asked Henry, busily tying knots.

Nobody was much good with a lasso. The constables unfroze, literally and figuratively, and entered into the spirit of the thing; one of them finally got the noose over the lightning-conductor of the summer-house, and another tied the opposite end of the rope to the branch of a large old tree growing on the banks of the stream.

“You’ve got to get to the railway line and back,” said Fran, alarmed by the sight of these preparations for the safety of a privately staked half-crown.

Henry indicated the wide sweep of the lawns with an airy wave. “Nothing easier. No ropes, no mirrors, nothing up my sleeve. Like to take a bye on it?”

Fran looked round the garden, bewildered. “From here to the railway line? And no rope? I don’t believe you can do it.”

“Well, then, why don’t you bet? Half a crown on the side?” He produced a huge pair of gum-boots from the folds of the overcoat and waded into the stream.

The stream led up to the railway line, dived under it and reappeared in the meadows beyond. Henry paused at the low viaduct, reaching up to lay the overcoat for a moment across the line; respectful of James’s feelings, he pulled it hurriedly down again and threw it over his shoulder. Half-way back down the stream, he halted at the tree where the rope was tied and began to scramble up. “Need I keep these boots on? They’re miles too big for me.”

Venetia was terrified. “Darling—you’re not going to try and tight-rope it?” She ran out under the sagging rope. “Henry—Henry darling, don’t be silly. Don’t do anything funny. You know you’ll fall off!”

He looked down, laughing, from a big safe branch. The rope stretched between him and the summer-house. “All right, sweetheart, I won’t make a martyr of myself for the sake of Fran’s half-crown. Move out of the way… here we come!” He grasped the rope with both hands and swung out, hanging at arms’ length, and started slowly to work himself along.

It was easy to drop into the open space at the side of the summer-house. He laid the overcoat on the seat, to look as little as possible like a propped-up body, and climbed out again on to the rope. “Are you going to make me get all the way home again?” he called, peering down at them from between his upstretched arms. “I’ve proved what I set out to prove. My arms are nearly out of my sockets; do let me off the rest!”

Venetia felt within herself a tiny, involuntary recoil. He looked like a little black monkey, swinging himself along hand over hand, grinning and chattering at them, imploring to be let down. She wished he would not make himself so cheap and ugly and ludicrous; his black eyes were shining with excitement in the cold, clear moonlight; she knew that he was enjoying himself, and yet that if she had run out under the tree and told him so, those heartless eyes would have melted at once into remorse and sympathy. Mysterious, intangible creature, whose depths she would never understand… elusive, gay, charming, adorable creature whom, for ever, she must passionately love. For the hundredth time she stifled the realisation that, of all the people about her, she could most readily imagine Henry a murderer.

They were helping him down, laughing and chattering, all but herself and Pendock. Pendock said gravely: “God knows what this is going to mean.”

James was always, in his idle way, the steadying influence; with a tendency to prick Henry’s bubbles for the pleasure of hearing them pop. He said: “It’s interesting, but I don’t see that it proves anything. You got there with an overcoat, but a body’s a different matter. Pippi was small, but she was muscular and she had rather big bones; she’d have weighed quite a lot. It nearly killed you doing it with a weight of, say, ten or twelve pounds. You couldn’t do it with more.”