A Shilling for Candles (21 page)

But that was before he had observed her interest—her strange
consuming interest—in Jason. Supposing—just supposing; to pass
the time while that woman made her boring way through the planets and back
again—that Marta
was
in love with this Harmer fellow. That made
Christine a double rival of hers, didn’t it? Christine had been where Marta,
for all her fashionable crust of superficiality and indifference, would have
given her right hand to be: at the top of her professional tree. So often
Marta had been within sight of that top, only to have the branch she relied
on break and let her down. Certainly, and beyond any doubt, Marta wanted
professional success. And certainly, for all her fair words, she had bitterly
grudged the little factory hand from the Midlands her staggering, and as it
seemed too easy, achievement. Five years ago Marta had been very nearly where
she was now: famous, successful, financially sound, and with the top of the
tree—that elusive, giddy top—somewhere in sight. It had been
somewhere in sight for five years. And meanwhile an unknown dancer from a
Broadway musical had sung, danced, and acted her way to canonization.

It was no wonder if Marta’s fair words where Christine was concerned were
the merest lip service. And supposing that Christine had not only the
position she had thirsted after, but the man she desired? What then? Was that
enough to make Marta Hallard hate to the point of murder?

Where was Marta when Christine was drowned? In Grosvenor Square,
presumably. After all, she was playing in that thing at the St. James’s. No,
wait! At that Saturday night party something was said about her being away!
What was it? What was it? She had said something about hard-working
actresses, and Clement Clements had mocked, saying: “Hard-working, forsooth.
And you’ve just had a week off to go dashing around the Continent!” She had
said: “Not a week, Clement! Only four days. And an actress can presumably
play with a broken spine but never with a gumboil.”

Clement had said that the gumboil didn’t prevent her having a grand time
at Deauville. And she had said: “Not Deauville. Le Touquet.”

Le Touquet. That was where she had been. And she had come back in time for
the Saturday matinee. They had talked about the reception she had had, and
the size of the “house,” and the rage of her understudy. She had come back
after four days at Le Touquet! She was in Le Touquet, just across the
channel, when Christine died.

“If parents would only study their children’s horoscopes with the same
diligence that they use to study their diets,” Lydia was saying, shrill as a
sparrow and about as impressive, “the world would be a much happier
place.”

“Le Touquet! Le Touquet!” exulted Jammy’s mind. Now he was getting
somewhere! Marta Hallard was not only within reach of Christine on that fatal
morning, but
she had the means to cover the distance easily
. Le
Touquet had opened the doors of his memory. Clements and she and Jammy in
that far corner by the cocktail cupboard, and she answering Clements’s idle
questions. She had flown over, it appeared, with someone in a private plane,
and had come back by the same method. And the plane had been an
amphibian!

On that misty morning a plane had landed either on the downs or on the
sea, had stayed a little, and had gone again without having entered into the
consciousness of any but one lonely swimmer. Jammy was so sure of it that he
could see the thing come out of the fog like a great bird and drop onto the
water.

Who had piloted that plane? Not Harmer. Harmer hadn’t been out of England.
That was why the police were taking such an interest in him. Harmer had been
only too much on the spot. He had an alibi of sorts, but Jammy didn’t know
whether it was a good one or not. The police were so damned secretive. Well,
he was on the track of something that the police, for all their vaunted
efficiency, had missed. Marta was a friend of Grant’s: it was natural that he
should overlook her: he had never seen her look at Harmer, as Jammy was
seeing her now; and he didn’t know about that plane, Jammy would take his
oath. And the plane made all the difference.

And if it was a case of a plane, then there were two in the business. The
pilot, if not an accomplice, was certainly an accessory before the fact.

At this point Jammy mentally stopped to draw breath. He looked surprisedly
along the well-dressed silent rows to the smart black-and-white figure in the
middle distance. What connection had that familiar presence with the person
his mind had drawn? There was the real Marta Hallard, her soigne, gracious,
serene self. How had he let his mind make her into something so tortured, so
desperate?

But she was still looking every now and then at Jason, her eyes resting
longer on him than they did on Lydia. And there was something in that
unguarded face that joined the real Marta to that shadowy one that his
imagination had created. Whatever she might be, Marta Hallard was after all
capable of strong feeling.

A patter like rain fell into Jammy’s thoughts; the polite percussion of
gloved hand on gloved hand. Lydia had apparently reached her peroration.
Jammy sighed happily and felt for his hat. He wanted to get out into the air
and think what his next move was to be. He hadn’t been so excited since Old
Man Willindon had given him the exclusive story of how and why he had beaten
his wife into pulp.

But there was going to be a question time, it would seem. Miss Keats,
sipping water and smiling benevolently between sips, was waiting for the
audience to collect its wits. Then some bold spirit began, and presently
questions were raining around her. Some were amusing; and the audience, a
little tired by the warm air, Lydia’s voice, and the dullish lecture, laughed
easily in relief. Presently the questions grew more intimate, and
then—so inevitably that half the audience could see it coming—the
query came:

Was it true that Miss Keats accurately foretold the manner of Christine
Clay’s death?

There was a shocked and eager silence. Lydia said, simply and with more
dignity than she usually possessed, that it was true; that she had often
foretold the future truly from a horoscope. She gave some instances.

Emboldened by the growing intimacy of the atmosphere, someone asked if she
was helped in her reading of horoscopes by second sight. She waited so long
before answering that stillness fell back on the moving heads and hands;
their eyes watched her expectantly.

“Yes,” she said, at length. “Yes. It is not a matter that I like to
discuss. But there are times when I have known, beyond reason, that a thing
is so.” She paused a moment, as if in doubt, and then took three steps
forward to the edge of the platform with such impetuosity that it seemed that
she meant to walk forward on to thin air. “And one thing I have known ever
since I stepped on the platform. The murderer of Christine Clay is here in
this hall.”

It is said that ninety-nine people out of a hundred, receiving a telegram
reading
All is discovered: fly
, will snatch a toothbrush and make for
the garage. Lydia’s words were so unexpected, and their meaning when
understood so horrifying, that there was a moment of blank silence. And then
the rush began, like the first breath of a hurricane through palm trees.
Above the rising babel, chairs shrieked like human beings as they were thrust
out of the way. And the more they were thrust aside, the greater the chaos
and the more frantic the anxiety of the escapers to reach the door. Not one
in the crowd knew what they were escaping from. With most of them it began as
a desire to escape from a tense situation; they belonged, as a class, to
people who hate “awkwardness.” But the difficulty of reaching the door
through the scattered chairs and the densely packed crowd increased their
natural desire to escape, into something like panic.

The chairman was saying something that was meant to be reassuring, to tide
over the situation: but he was quite inaudible. Someone had gone to Lydia,
and Jammy heard her say:

“What made me say that? Oh, what made me say that?”

He had moved forward to mount the platform, all the journalist in him
tingling with anticipation. But as he laid his hand on the platform edge to
vault, he recognized Lydia’s escort. It was the fellow from the
Courier
. She was practically the
Courier
.s property, he
remembered. It was a million to one against his getting a word with her, and,
at these odds, it wasn’t worth the effort. There was better game, after all.
When Lydia had made that incredible statement, Jammy, having abruptly pulled
his own jaw into place, had turned to see how two people took the shock.

Marta had gone quite white, and a look of something like fury had come
into her face. She had been one of the first to get to her feet, moving so
abruptly that Lejeune was taken by surprise and had to fish his hat from
under her heels. She had made for the door without a second glance at the
platform or Lydia, but since she had had a seat in the front rows she had
become firmly wedged halfway down the hall, where confusion became worse
confounded by someone having violent hysteria.

Jason Harmer, on the other hand, had not moved a muscle. He had gone on
looking at Lydia with the same pleased interest during and after her
staggering announcement as he had shown before. He had made no move to get up
until people began to walk over him. Then he rose leisurely, helped a woman
to climb over a chair that was blocking her path, patted his pocket to assure
himself that something or other was there (his gloves probably), and turned
to the door.

It took Jammy several minutes of scientific shoving to reach Marta, wedged
in an alcove between two radiators.

“The silly fools!” she said viciously, when Jammy had reminded her who he
was. And she glared, with most un-Hallard-like lack of poise, at her fellow
beings.

“Nicer with an orchestra pit between, aren’t they?”

Marta remembered that these were her public, and he could see her
automatically pull herself together. But she was still what Jammy called “het
up.”

“Amazing business,” he said, prompting. And in explanation: “Miss
Keats.”

“An utterly disgusting exhibition!”

“Disgusting?” said Jammy, at a loss. “Why doesn’t she turn cartwheels in
the Strand?”

“You think this was just a publicity stunt?”

“What do you call it? A sign from Heaven?”

“But you said yourself, Miss Hallard, that night you were so kind as to
put up with me, that she isn’t a quack. That she really—”

“Of course she isn’t a quack! She has done some amazing horoscopes. But
that is a very different matter from this finding of murderers at a penny a
time. If Lydia doesn’t take care,” she said after a pause and with venom,
“she will end by being an Aimee McPherson!”

It occurred to Jammy that this was hardly the line he had expected Marta
to hand out. He didn’t know what he had expected. But somehow it wasn’t this.
Into the pause that tone: e: doubt made, she said in a new crisp tone.

“This isn’t by any chance an interview, is it, Mr. Hopkins? Because if so,
please understand quite clearly that I have said none of these things.”

“All right, Miss Hallard, you haven’t said a word. Unless the police ask
me, of course,” he added, smiling.

“I don’t think the police are on speaking terms with you,” she said. “And
now, if you will be so kind as to stand a little to your left, I think I can
get past you into that space over there.”

She nodded to him, smiled a little, pushed her scented person past him
into the place of vantage, and was swallowed up in the crowd.

“Not a ha’penny change!” said Jammy to himself. And ruefully began to push
his way back to where he had last seen Jason Harmer. Dowagers cursed him and
debutantes glared, but half Jammy’s life had been spent in getting through
crowds. He made a good job of it.

“And what do
you
think of this, Mr. Harmer?”

Jason eyed him in a good-humored silence. “How much?” he said at last.
“How much what?”

“How much for my golden words?”

“A free copy of the paper.”

Jason laughed, then his face grew sober. “Well, I think it has been a most
instructive afternoon. You believe in this star stuff?”

“Can’t say I do.”

“Me, I’m not so sure. There’s a lot in that crack about more things in
heaven and earth whatever-it-is. I’ve seen some funny things happen in the
village where I was born. Witchcraft and that. No accounting for any of it by
any natural means. Makes you wonder.”

“Where was that?”

Jason looked suddenly startled for the first time that afternoon. “East of
Europe,” he said abruptly. And went on: “That Miss Keats, she’s a wonder. Not
a canny thing to have around the house, though. No, sir! Must spoil your
chances of matrimony quite a bit to be able to see what’s going to happen. To
say nothing of what has been happening. Every man has a right to his
alibis.”

Was no one, thought Jammy in exasperation, going to take the expected line
of country this afternoon! Perhaps if he pushed his way into Lydia’s
presence, she at least would behave according to the pattern he had marked
out for her.

“You believe that Miss Keats was genuinely feeling the presence of evil
when she made that statement?” he pursued hopefully.

“Sure, sure!” Jason looked a little surprised. “You don’t make a fool of
yourself that way unless you’re pretty worked up.

“I noticed you weren’t very surprised by the statement.”

“I been in the States fifteen years. Nothing surprises me anymore. Ever
seen Holy Rollers? Ever seen Coney Island? Ever seen a tramp trying to sell a
gold mine? Go west, young man, go west!”

“I’m going home to bed,” said Jammy, and took his pushing way through the
crowd.

But by the time he had reached the vestibule, he had recovered a little.
He adjusted his collar and waited to see the crowd move past. Once outside
the inner door, and breathing the secure air of Wigmore Street, they
recovered from their fright and broke with one accord into excited
speech.