Heads You Lose (20 page)

“
I
couldn’t,” said Henry, examining his blistered hands. “But then, I’m on a small scale, and I haven’t got the English respect for the Bicep; I detest outdoor games and messing about with dumbbells and things.
I
couldn’t have done it; but I still believe that it could have been done—by someone with very strong arms. It would have to be a pretty hefty man, or a—a gorilla, or a…”

“Or a trapeze artist,” said Pendock, and turned away from them and walked off slowly up to the darkened house.

A trapeze artist! Cockrill, stumping back up the drive, paused in the shadows, electrified by Pendock’s words, carrying clearly in the cold night air. Trotty! There it had been all this time, staring him in the face. Trotty, who had known both Grace Morland and Pippi from their childhood, who might have had a thousand reasons for wishing to murder them. He recognised, all of a sudden, a likeness between Trotty and Pippi, their rather large heads and carroty hair, a length of body that had made them appear a little out of proportion, a certain toughness, both physical and mental… He wondered if Trotty could be in any way connected with the woman who had been Pippi’s mother; she had always cared more for Pippi than for the fastidious, smug, self-righteous Grace.

Trotty! Grace Morland
had
told her, of course, about the hat. Perhaps she had sneered at Fran, had said filthy things about her, as she had to Pendock. Trotty was fond of Fran and Venetia. She would have seen Fran and James in the orchard, would have put two and two together and deduced that open back door; would have come up to the house and taken the hat from the hall-stand, while they stood and talked beneath the fruit trees; would have thrust it upon the head of her murdered mistress, crying with insane derision: “There, take that, you self-satisfied hypocrite…” and, laughing perhaps, or weeping, would have scrambled away on pitiful, twisted legs…

And Pippi had seen it all, or part of it, so Pippi had had to die too. Trotty must have followed Pendock back to the house that night, after he had seen Pippi to the cottage, hurrying after him with the jerking, crab-wise movement that filled one’s heart with pity and disgust; she would have stood there quietly at the front door, holding it a little ajar, watching Pendock dismiss the maid, watching him put the scarf into the drawer, watching him go off to the drawing-room. She must have slipped in at once and gone to the telephone—on what mad impulse nobody could know—and put through her call to himself, standing there impatiently, one ear cocked for the opening of the drawing-room door. There hadn’t been much time, but she could have put down the receiver quietly and snatched up the scarf and been out of the front door before Pendock had finished his good-nights; and all he had had to do was to lock the door after her.

He crossed the bridge that led to Pigeonsford Cottage.

Pendock was sitting in the drawing-room when they all got back to the house, staring into the fire; he looked very white and strained. As Henry plumped himself down on the sofa beside him, he said, with a sort of illogical resentment: “I suppose you’re going to go running to Cockrill with this—discovery?”

Henry was astonished at the tone of his voice, but he said lightly: “The discovery’s all washed up. We couldn’t get the rope off again!”

“You couldn’t get it off?”

“Not from the stream; and of course if we’d gone nearer, the marks would have shown in the snow. I suppose Trotty, with her circus training, might conceivably have got the lasso round the lightning conductor from the stream, but she couldn’t have got it off—the noose just tightened round the base of the thing.”

“It needn’t have been a slip-noose,” said Pendock doubtfully.

“We tried the other way, too. It can’t be done.”

Pendock was silent, his heart warm with joy for poor old Trotty, who was not a murderess after all; even if it did leave now, all over again, only the six of them: himself and Lady Hart and Fran and Venetia and Henry and James. James was saying vaguely that perhaps she hadn’t got the rope down, but had just tossed it all up on to the roof of the summer-house.

“No, no; the police would have found it. They looked up there for the weapon.”

“Anyway, the whole thing was rather potty,” said Fran, sitting Aziz upright on her knee and lovingly stroking his tummy. “Just because Trotty’s arms may still be strong, it doesn’t mend her legs, and she’s been like this for too many years for it all to have been a put-up job. I can remember, when we were little girls, seeing Trotty starting off before everybody else to get to church in time on a Sunday morning; and propping herself up against the counter in Maggis’s while she did her shopping… can’t you, Venetia?”

“Of course,” said Venetia joyfully, for she too was glad that Trotty was safe.

“Anyway, that’ll be five bob from you, please, Fran.”

“It will not be anything of the sort,” said Fran, putting down Aziz and preparing to give battle. “You said you would prove that the murderer could have done it that way, and you’ve failed. I’ll pay up the half-crown for the wading-in-the-stream idea, because I think that was good; but I’m not going to fork out the second one, definitely.”

“I proved that the murderer could have got to the summer-house and back…”

“Yes, but he couldn’t have got the rope down…”

“I never said anything about getting the rope down…”

James lay back in a big arm-chair, looking on from beneath his lazy eyelids. “What do
you
think, Jimmy?” said Fran, working her way towards him on her knees.

Lady Hart and Venetia and Henry were involved in a heated argument. James bent forward and took her hands in his. “I think you’re the loveliest little thing on God’s earth,” he said.

She knelt before him, laughing and blushing, and looking up into his face. “James
dar
ling—someone’ll hear you!”

He did not laugh. “Fran, does it matter if they do? Just say you’ll marry me, Fran, and all the world can know that I think you’re the most exquisite, adorable, desirable woman that ever drove a man mad with longing. Dear Fran, sweet Fran, my lovely heart, tell me you’ll marry me; one day when all this is over, even if it is in this dreadful way that I’ve become free to ask you… do say you’ll marry me, Fran?”

She looked round her anxiously, pulling her hands away from him; the three contestants wrangled over her bet; Pendock lay back on the sofa, his face in the shadow. She scrambled to her feet and, as she moved, stooped forward and gave James a little fleeting kiss on the corner of his mouth. “I might,” she said; and a moment later was defending her second half-crown.

Pendock sat silent in the shadows, blind with pain and jealousy and a desperate sense of defeat. He did not look up as Cockrill came into the room and took up his favourite attitude before the fireplace, fishing for papers and tobacco. Cockrill said abruptly: “I’ve just been down to the cottage to see Trotty.”

“It wasn’t Trotty,” they all said quickly.

“You don’t say so?” said Cockrill, with an edge to his sarcasm all the more keen because he himself had been fooled by the easy coincidence of the rope and the trapeze artist. He added sweetly: “And you all realise what that means?”

“That it must be one of us?” suggested Fran.

Cockrill took a big resolution. He said, staring thoughtfully at the tip of his cigarette: “If I could prove to you that it was one of yourselves—what d’you suppose you would do?”

“What would we
do,
Cockie?”

“What would the rest of you do?” said Cockie impatiently. “You’re all very good friends; most of you are more to each other than that. What would the others do if I told you that one amongst you was a murderer? Whose side would you be on? Would you stick by him—a man who had killed a woman and cut off her head?”

“A man?” said Lady Hart, staring at him.

“A man or a woman,” said Cockrill irritably. “Can’t you use your imaginations? I’m speaking in the wide sense. What would the rest of you do about it? Would you give him up to justice?”

“It wouldn’t be anything to do with us,” put in Henry calmly. “If you knew the truth, we couldn’t protect him anyway.”

“I might not be able to prove the truth,” said Cockie, intent on his cigarette.

“Are you suggesting that we should help you to prove it?” asked Venetia indignantly. “Do you think we would turn against each other…?”

“Not in the case of murder and mutilation?”

They were silent. “Perhaps it depends on the motive,” said Lady Hart at last.

“The motive in this case was fear.”

“But fear of what?” said Fran.

“Fear for your safety,” said Cockrill. He lifted his head suddenly from the contemplation of his cigarette and said steadily: “Wasn’t it, Mr. Pendock?”

Pendock sat motionless and did not speak. Two of the police guard moved a little nearer. Fran said, going straight to the heart of the matter: “But the person who telephoned—that wasn’t Pen! He was with us in the drawing-room when the woman started telephoning to you. There
was
a seventh person involved! It couldn’t have been Pen. And if she could have telephoned, why couldn’t she have murdered Pippi, too?” She jumped up and stood before Cockrill at the mantelpiece. “Of
course
it wasn’t Pen. Of
course
it was the woman who telephoned that killed Pippi le May.”

“Have you ever considered,” said Cockie, looking straight at her, grimly derisive, “that the woman who telephoned was Pippi le May herself?”

“Pippi!
The woman who telephoned? But she said she was the murderer of Grace Morland.”

“Perhaps she was,” said Cockrill, and started on another cigarette.

They stared at him, stupefied. He said quietly: “I’ll tell you a little story; shall I, Mr. Pendock?”

Pendock’s silence was the worst thing of all. He made a tiny motion of his hand, cigarette between two fingers, as though to say: Carry on.
I
don’t care.

“It’s the story of a—we’ll call him a fairy prince,” suggested Cockie, looking round at them with his little, mocking, bright dark eyes. “He was a very good, upright prince, and he was, of course, in love with the customary fairy princess.

“One day there came to the prince’s kingdom something unimaginably evil, a creature of some darkness that we don’t quite understand, and she killed one of the prince’s people and cut off her head and flung her into a ditch—perhaps one day we shall find out why. And then she remembered something that her victim had mentioned earlier that day, and she crept up to the prince’s palace and through the back door which a certain young couple had left open while they did a little spooning in the orchard at the bottom of the prince’s garden; and she took from the palace the princess’s little ridiculous hat, and armed with this hat she added a final, mocking insult by thrusting it on to the head of the poor mutilated corpse in the ditch.”

“You are positively lyrical, Inspector,” said James from the depths of an arm-chair.

Cockrill ignored him. “And the next evening, because there was no such unfairy-like thing as a telephone in her home, the murderess came up to the palace and, standing in the hall, rang up the police-station and said, gloating in her madness, that the fairy princess was ‘next.’ And while she still held the receiver in her hand, the prince came out into the hall.”

He paused. Pendock spoke for the first time. “What did he do?”

Cockrill swung towards him and looked him in the eyes. “What would
you
have done?” he said.

Pendock did not answer. “This is what my prince did,” said Cockie, rocking backwards and forwards gently, warming the seat of his trousers at the fire. “In his horror and rage, and in his deadly fear for his beautiful princess, he went up to the creature and put his hands round her throat and choked the life out of her. What he did next he did, perhaps in anger, or perhaps to disguise his actions and make them appear the work of the maniac who had gone before… he heard the whistle of the train and, dragging the body out through the falling snow, he lifted it on to the line and let the train run cleanly across the neck; and then he carried head and body to a place where they would not be found until the following day, and left them there. I don’t know why he tied the head back to the body with a scarf. Perhaps it was revenge for the business of the hat; perhaps it was with some vague idea of putting off discovery a little longer by making it appear that a live woman sat in the little summer-house… but of course
he
would have known where to look for the scarf.”

There was a long, long silence. Pendock drew upon the stub of his cigarette and flung it into the fire. He said at last: “How long is it since you got all this worked out?”

“Since I saw Trotty this evening; she happened to mention that, according to your maid Gladys, Pippi le May said on the night of her death, that she had left her glasses up at your house.”

“What has that got to do with it?” said Pendock.

“She hadn’t left them there.”

“I know. Gladys told her that they were on the mantelpiece in her own drawing-room.”

“She knew that already,” said Cockie.

“Well then, why did she say she must come back to Pigeonsford and get them?” Light began to break and he answered his own question: “I see. You think she wanted a reason for getting back into the house?”

“She wanted an excuse if she were found in the house,” said Cockrill. “She was going to use your telephone.”

“Why didn’t she run down to the village? There’s a call-box there.”

“She wanted to throw suspicion on someone, or anyone, in your house.”

“I see,” said Pendock again. He added, after a moment: “So you think I’m a murderer?”

“I think you constituted yourself executioner, Mr. Pendock,” said Cockie with a deprecatory air.

Lady Hart was the first to break the silence. She said deliberately, sitting up very straight in her chair: “This is a terrible mistake. You’ve got it wrong, Inspector. You can’t prove anything from all this…”

“I seem to remember mentioning that point at the beginning of this little chat,” said Cockie coolly. “I suggested that perhaps, if they knew him to be a murderer, his friends might put a little pressure on Mr. Pendock…”