Cover Her Face (18 page)

“Isn’t that Sally’s aunt?” asked Deborah. A thin, nervous-looking woman with hair which might once have been red was talking to Miss Liddell. They walked away together towards the churchyard gate. “Surely it’s the same woman who identified Sally at the inquest. If it is the aunt perhaps we could drive her home. The buses are dreadfully infrequent at this time of day.”

“It might be worthwhile having a word with her,” said Felix consideringly. Deborah’s suggestion had originally been prompted by simple kindness, the wish to save someone a long wait in the hot sun. But now the practical advantages of her proposal asserted themselves.

“Do get Miss Liddell to introduce you, Felix. I’ll bring the car round. You might find out where Sally worked before she got pregnant, and who Jimmy’s father is and whether Sally’s uncle really liked her.”

“In two or three moments of casual conversation? I hardly think so.”

“We should have all the drive to pump her. Do try, Felix.”
Deborah sped after her mother and Catherine with as much speed as decency permitted, leaving Felix to his task. The woman and Miss Liddell had reached the road now and were pausing for a few last words. From a distance the two figures seemed to be excuting some kind of ceremonial dance. They moved together to shake hands, then bobbed apart. Then Miss Liddell, who had turned away, swung back with some fresh remark and the figures drew together again.

As Felix moved towards them they turned to watch him and he could see Miss Liddell’s lips moving. He joined them and the inescapable introductions were made. A thin hand, gloved in cheap black rayon, held his hand timidly for a brief second and then dropped. Even in that apathetic and almost imperceptible contact he sensed that she was shaking. The anxious grey eyes looked away from his as he spoke.

“Mrs. Riscoe and I were wondering if we might drive you home,” he said gently. “There will be a long wait for a bus and we should be very glad of the drive.” That at least was the truth. She hesitated. Just as Miss Liddell had apparently decided that the offer, although unexpected, could not in decency be ignored and might even be safely accepted and had begun to urge this course, Deborah drew up beside them in Felix’s Renault and the matter was settled. Sally’s aunt was introduced to her as Mrs. Victor Proctor and was comfortably ensconced beside her in the front of the car before anyone had time for argument. Felix settled himself in the back, aware of some distaste for the enterprise but prepared to admire Deborah in action. “Painless extractions a speciality,” he thought as the car swung away down the hill. He wondered how far they were going and whether Deborah had bothered to tell her mother how long they would be away.

“I think I know roughly where you live,” he heard her
saying. “It’s just outside Canningbury, isn’t it? We go through it on our way to London. But I shall have to rely on you for the road. It’s very sweet of you to let us drive you home. Funerals are so awful. It really is a relief to get away for a time.” The result of this was unexpected. Suddenly Mrs. Proctor was crying, not noisily, hardly even without moving her face. Almost as if her tears were without any possibility of control she let them slide in a stream down her cheeks and fall on to her folded hands. When she spoke her voice was low but clear enough to be heard above the engine. And still the tears fell silently and without effort.

“I shouldn’t have come really. Mr. Proctor wouldn’t like it if he knew I’d come. He won’t be back when I get home and Beryl is at school, so he won’t know. But he wouldn’t like it. She’s made her own bed so let her lie on it. That’s what he says and you can’t blame him. Not after what he’s done for her. There was never any difference between Sally and Beryl. Never. I’ll say that to the day I die. I don’t know why it had to happen to us.”

This perennial cry of the unfortunate struck Felix as unreasonable. He was not aware that the Proctors had accepted any responsibility for Sally since her pregnancy and they had certainly succeeded in dissociating themselves from her death. He leaned forward to hear more clearly. Deborah may have made some kind of encouraging sound, he could not be sure. But there was to be no question of pumping this witness. She had been keeping things to herself for too long.

“We brought her up decently. No one can say we didn’t. It hasn’t always been easy. She did get the scholarship but we still had to feed her. She wasn’t an easy child. I used to think it was the bombing but Mr. Proctor wouldn’t have that. They were with us at the time, you know. We had a house in Stoke
Newington then. There hadn’t been many raids and somehow we felt safe with the Anderson shelter and everything. It was one of those V1 rockets that did for Lil and George. I don’t remember anything about it nor about being dug out. They never told me about Lil for a week afterwards. They got us all out but Lil was dead and George died in hospital. We were the lucky ones. At least I suppose we were. Mr. Proctor was really bad for a long time and, of course, he’s got his disability. But they said we were the lucky ones.”

“Like me,” thought Felix bitterly. “One of the lucky ones.”

“And then you took Sally and brought her up,” prompted Deborah.

“There wasn’t anyone else really. Mother couldn’t have taken her. She wasn’t fit for it. I tried to think that Lil would have liked it, but those sort of thoughts can’t help you to love a child. She wasn’t loving really. Not like Beryl. But then Sally was ten before Beryl arrived and I suppose it was hard on her after being the only one for so long. But we never made a difference. They always had the same, piano lessons and everything. And now this. The police came round after she died. They weren’t in uniform or anything, but you could see who they were. Everyone knew about it. They asked who the man was but, of course, we couldn’t say.”

“The man who killed her?” Deborah sounded incredulous.

“Oh no. The father of the baby. I suppose they thought he might have done it. But we couldn’t tell them anything.”

“I suppose they asked a lot of questions about where you were on the night.”

For the first time Mrs. Proctor seemed aware of her tears. She fumbled in her handbag and wiped them away. Interest in her story seemed to have assuaged whatever grief she was indulging. Felix thought that it was unlikely that she wept for
Sally. Was it the resurrected memory of Lil, of George and of the helpless child they had left behind which had caused those tears, or was it just weariness and a sense of failure?

Almost as if she sensed his question she said, “I don’t know why I’m crying. Crying can’t bring back the dead. I suppose it was the service. We had that hymn for Lil. ‘The King of Love my Shepherd Is.’ It doesn’t seem right for either of them really. You were asking about the police. I suppose you’ve had your share of them, too. They came to us all right. I told them I was at home with Beryl. They asked if we went to the fête at Chadfleet. I told them we didn’t know anything about it. Not that we would have gone. We didn’t see Sally ever and we didn’t want to come nosing around where she worked. I could remember the day all right. It was funny really. Miss Liddell telephoned in the morning to talk to Mr. Proctor which she hadn’t done since Sally took her new job. Beryl answered the ’phone and it made her feel quite queer. She thought something must have happened to Sally for Miss Liddell to ’phone. But it was only to say that Sally was doing all right. It was funny though. She knew we didn’t want to hear.”

It must have struck Deborah as strange, too, for she asked, “Had Miss Liddell telephoned before to tell you how Sally was getting on?”

“No. Not since Sally went to Martingale. She telephoned to tell us that. At least I think she did. She may have written to Mr. Proctor, but I can’t be sure. I suppose she thought that we ought to know about Sally leaving the Home, Mr. Proctor being her guardian. At least he used to be, but now she’s over twenty-one and on her own it’s nothing to us where she goes. She never cared for us, not for any of us, not even Beryl. I thought I’d better come today because it looks queer if no one from the family’s there, whatever Mr. Proctor may say. But he was right
really. You can’t help the dead by being there and it’s only upsetting. All those people, too. They ought to have something better to do.”

“So Mr. Proctor hadn’t seen Sally since she left your house?” pursued Deborah.

“Oh, no. There wouldn’t be any point in it, would there?”

“I expect the police asked him where he was on the night she died. They always do. Of course it’s only a formality.”

If Deborah had been afraid of causing offence she was worrying unnecessarily.

“It’s funny the way they go on. You’d have thought we knew something about it by the way they talked. Asking questions about Sally’s life and whether she had any expectations and who her friends were. Anyone would think she was someone important. They had Beryl in to ask about the telephone call from Miss Liddell. They even asked Mr. Proctor what he was doing the night Sally died. Not that we were likely to forget that night. It was the one he had his cycle accident. He wasn’t home till twelve and he was in a proper bad state with his lip all swollen and the cycle bent up. He lost his watch, too, which was upsetting as his father left it to him and it was real gold. Very valuable they always told us. We aren’t likely to forget that night in a hurry I can tell you.”

Mrs. Proctor had now recovered completely from the emotional effects of the funeral and was chatting away with the eagerness of someone who is more accustomed to listening than to getting a hearing. Deborah was making light work of the driving. Her hands lay gently on the wheel and her blue eyes gazed steadily on the road ahead, but Felix had little doubt that most of her mind was on other matters. She made sympathetic sounds in reply to Mrs. Proctor’s story and replied, “What a horrid shock for you both! You must have been terribly
worried when he was so late. How did it happen?”

“He came off at the bottom of a hill somewhere Finchworthy way. I don’t know exactly where. He was coming down fast and someone had left broken glass in the road. Of course it ripped the front tyre and he lost control and went into the ditch. He might have been killed as I told him, or badly injured, and if he had, goodness knows what would have happened because those roads are very lonely. You could lie there for hours and no one come by. Mr. Proctor doesn’t like the busy roads for cycling and I don’t wonder. There’s no peace if you don’t get away by yourself.”

“Is he fond of cycling?” asked Deborah.

“Cycling mad. Always has been. Of course he doesn’t go in for the real road work now. Not since the war and being bombed. He did a lot of it when he was young though. But he still likes to get about and we don’t usually see much of him on Saturday afternoons.”

Mrs. Proctor’s voice held a shade of relief which was not lost on either of her listeners. A bicycle and an accident can be a useful alibi, thought Felix, but he can’t be a serious suspect if he was indoors by twelve. It would take him at least an hour to get home from Martingale even if the accident were faked, and he had the use of the bicycle all the way. It was difficult, too, to imagine an adequate motive since Proctor had obviously found no reason to murder his niece before her admission to St. Mary’s and had apparently had no contact with her since. Felix’s mind played with the possibility of a future inheritance for Sally which, at her death, would conveniently devolve upon Beryl Proctor. But in his heart he knew that he was looking not for the murderer of Sally Jupp but for someone with sufficient motive and opportunity to divert the police investigation from more likely suspects. It seemed a forlorn
hope so far as the Proctors were concerned, but Deborah had obviously made up her mind that there was something to be discovered from them. The time factor was apparently worrying her, too.

“Did you wait up for your husband, Mrs. Proctor? You must have been getting pretty desperate by midnight unless he was usually late.”

“Well, he was usually a bit late and he always said not to wait up so I didn’t. I go to the pictures most Saturdays with Beryl. We’ve got the telly, of course, and we sometimes watch that, but it makes a change to get out of the house once a week.”

“So you were in bed when your husband returned?” Deborah insisted gently.

“He had his own key, of course, so there wasn’t any point in waiting up. If I’d known he was going to be so late it would have been different. I usually go up to bed about ten when Mr. Proctor’s out. Mind you, there’s not the same rush on a Sunday morning, but I was never one for late nights. That’s what I told the police. ‘I was never one for late nights,’ I said. They were asking about Mr. Proctor’s accident, too. The inspector was very sympathetic. ‘Not home until nearly twelve,’ I told them. They could see it had been a worrying night without Sally getting herself murdered like that.”

“I expect Mr. Proctor woke you when he arrived home. It must have been terribly worrying to see him in that condition.”

“Oh, it was! I heard him in the bathroom and when I called out he came in to me. His face looked awful, a terrible green colour streaked with blood, and he was shaking all over. I don’t know how he got home. I got up to make him a cup of tea while he had a bath. I remember the time because he called
down to ask me what it was. He’d lost his watch you see after the accident, and we’d only got the little kitchen clock and the one in the front room. That said ten minutes past midnight and the kitchen one said the same. It was a shock to me I can tell you. It must have been half past twelve before we were back in bed and I never thought he’d be fit to get up the next morning. But he did, the same as usual. He always goes down first and makes the tea. He thinks no one can make tea like him and he does bring up a good cup. But I never thought he’d get up early that Sunday, not after what he looked like the night before. He’s still shaken up by it even now. That’s why he didn’t go to the inquest. And then to have the police arriving that morning to tell us about Sally. We shan’t forget that night in a hurry.”

They had reached Canningbury now and there was a long wait at the traffic lights which regulated the surge of traffic meeting at the High Road and the Broadway. It was obviously a popular shopping afternoon in this overcrowded suburb of east London. The pavements were spilling with housewives who every now and then, as if propelled by some primeval urge, streamed with maddening slowness across the path of the traffic. The shops on both sides of the road had once been a row of houses and their grandiose windows and frontages were in incongruous contrast to the modest roofs and windows above. The town hall, which looked as if it had been designed by a committee of morons in an excess of alcohol and civic pride, stood in isolated splendour bounded by two bombed sites where rebuilding had only just begun.