Cover Her Face (27 page)

Eleanor Maxie spoke for the first time: “It is a pity that you didn’t tell us about this earlier. That poor boy should certainly have been spared a great deal of worry.”

They seemed to have forgotten the presence of Dalgliesh, but now he spoke: “Mr. Maxie had a reason for his silence. He realized that it was important for you all that the police should think that a ladder had been available within easy reach of Sally’s window. He knew the approximate time of death and he wasn’t anxious for the police to know that the ladder hadn’t been returned to the old stable before twenty past twelve. With luck we should assume that it had been there all night. For much the same reason he was vague about the time he left Bocock’s cottage and lied about the time he got to bed. If Sally was killed at midnight by someone under this roof he was anxious that there should be no lack of suspects. He realized that most crimes are solved by a process of elimination. On the other hand I think he was telling the truth about the time he locked the south door. That was at about twelve thirty-three and we know now that at twelve thirty-three Sally Jupp had been dead for over half an hour. She died before Mr. Maxie left Bocock’s cottage and about the same time as Mr. Wilson of the village store got out of bed to shut a creaking window and saw Derek Pullen walking quietly past, head bent, towards Martingale. Pullen was hoping, perhaps, to see Sally and to hear her explanation. But he only reached the cover of the old stables before Mr. Maxie arrived, carrying the ladder. And by then Sally Jupp was dead.”

“So it wasn’t Pullen?” said Catherine.

“How could it have been?” said Stephen roughly. “He certainly hadn’t killed her when he spoke to me and he was in no condition to turn back and kill her after I had left him. He could hardly see his way to his own front gate.”

“And if Sally was dead before Stephen got back from visiting Bocock, it couldn’t have been him either,” pointed out Catherine. It was, Dalgliesh noticed, the first time that any of them had specifically referred to the possible guilt or innocence of a member of the family.

Stephen Maxie said: “How do you know that she was dead then? She was alive at ten-thirty p.m. and dead by the morning. That’s as much as anyone knows.”

“Not really,” replied Dalgliesh. “Two people can put the time of death closer than that. One is the murderer, but there is someone else who can help too.”

There was a knock on the door and Martha stood there, capped and aproned, stolid as always. Her hair was strained back beneath her curiously high old-fashioned cap, her ankles bulged above the barred black shoes. If the Maxies were seeing in their mind’s eye a desperate woman, clutching to herself that incriminating bottle and homing to her familiar kitchen like a frightened animal they gave no sign. She looked as she had always looked and if she had become a stranger she was less alien than they now were to each other. She gave no explanation of her presence except to announce “Mr. Proctor for the Inspector.” Then she was gone again and the shadowy figure behind her stepped forward into the light. Proctor was too angry to be disconcerted at being shown thus summarily into a roomful of people obviously occupied with their private concerns. He seemed to notice no one but Dalgliesh and advanced towards him belligerently.

“Look here, Inspector, I’ve got to have protection. It isn’t good enough. I’ve been trying to get you at the station. They wouldn’t tell me where you were, if you please, but I wasn’t
going to be fobbed off with that station sergeant. I thought I’d find you here. Something’s got to be done about it.”

Dalgliesh considered him in silence for a minute. “What isn’t good enough, Mr. Proctor?” he inquired.

“That young fellow. Sally’s husband. He’s been round home threatening me. He was drunk if you ask me. It’s not my fault if she got herself murdered and I told him so. I won’t have him upsetting my wife. And there are the neighbours. You could hear him shouting his insults right down the avenue. My daughter was there, too—it’s not nice in front of a child. I’m innocent of this murder as you very well know, and I want protection.”

He looked indeed as if he could have done with protection against more than James Ritchie. He was a scrawny red-faced little man with the look of an angry hen and a trick of jerking his head as he talked. He was neatly but cheaply dressed. The grey raincoat was clean and the trilby hat, held stiffly in his gloved hands, had recently acquired a new band. Catherine said suddenly, “You were in this house on the day of the murder, weren’t you? We saw you on the stairs. You must have been coming from Sally’s room.”

Stephen glanced at his mother and said: “You’d better come in and join the prayer meeting, Mr. Proctor. Public confessions are said to be good for the soul. Actually you’ve timed your entrance rather well. You are, I assume, interested in hearing who killed your niece?”

“No!” said Hearne suddenly and violently. “Don’t be a fool, Maxie. Keep him out of it.”

His voice recalled Proctor to a sense of his surroundings. He focused his attention on Felix and seemed to dislike what he saw. “So I’m not to stay! Suppose I choose to stay. I’ve a right to know what’s going on.” He glared round at the watchful,
unwelcoming faces. “You’d like it to be me, wouldn’t you? All of you. Don’t think I don’t know. You’d like to pin it on me all right if you could. I’d have been in queer street if she’d been poisoned or knocked on the head. Pity one of you couldn’t keep your hands off her, wasn’t it? But there’s one thing you can’t pin on me and that’s a strangling. And why? That’s why!”

He gave a sudden convulsive movement, there was a click and a moment of sheer unbelievable comedy as his artificial right hand fell with a thud on the desk in front of Dalgliesh. They gazed at it fascinated while it lay like some obscene relic, its rubber fingers curved in impotent supplication. Breathing heavily, Proctor hitched a chair beneath himself with a deft twist of his left hand and sat there triumphantly, while Catherine turned her pale eyes on him reproachfully as if he were a difficult patient who had behaved with more than customary petulance.

Dalgliesh picked up the hand. “We knew about this, of course, although I’m glad to say that my own attention was first brought to it less spectacularly. Mr. Proctor lost his right hand in a bombing incident. The ingenious substitute is made of moulded linen and glue. It’s light and strong and has three articulated fingers with knuckle joints like a real hand. By flexing his left shoulder and slightly moving his arm away from his body, the wearer can tighten a control cord which runs from the shoulder to the thumb. This opens the thumb against the pressure of a spring. Once the tension on the shoulder is released the spring automatically closes the thumb against the firm fixed index finger. It is, as you can see, a clever contraption, and Mr. Proctor can do a great deal with it. He can get through his work, ride a bicycle and present an almost normal appearance to the world. But there’s one thing he can’t do, and that is to kill by manual strangulation.”

“He could be left-handed.”

“He could be, Miss Bowers, but he isn’t, and the evidence shows that Sally was killed by a strong right-handed grip.” He turned the hand over and pushed it across the table to Proctor.

“This, of course, was the hand which a certain small boy saw opening the trap-door of Bocock’s stables. There could only be one person connected with this case who would be wearing leather gloves on a hot summer day and at a garden fête. This was one clue to his identity and there were others. Miss Bowers is quite right. Mr. Proctor was in Martingale that afternoon.”

“Oh, come now, Proctor,” said Felix. “You aren’t going to tell us that this was a dutiful social call, that you were just dropping in to inquire after the baby’s health! How much was she asking?”

Before Proctor could answer Dalgliesh broke in: “She was asking for thirty pounds because she wanted to have some money ready for the return of her husband. It had been arranged that she should go on working and save what she could. Sally meant to keep that bargain to the last pound, baby or no baby. She intended to get this money from her uncle by a not uncommon method. She told him that she was shortly to be married, she didn’t say to whom, and that she and her husband would make his treatment of her public unless he bought her silence. She threatened to expose him to his employers and the respectable neighbours of Canningbury. She talked about being done out of her rights. On the other hand, if he chose to pay up, neither she nor her husband would ever see or worry the Proctors again.”

“But that was blackmail,” cried Catherine. “He should have told her to go ahead and say what she liked. No one would have believed her. She wouldn’t have got a penny out of me!”
Proctor sat silent. The others seemed to have forgotten his presence. Dalgliesh continued.

“I think Mr. Proctor would have been very willing to take your advice, Miss Bowers, if his niece hadn’t made use of one particular phrase. She talked about being done out of her rights. She probably meant no more than that a difference was made in the treatment of herself and her cousin, although Mrs. Proctor would deny that this was so. She may have known more than we realize. But for reasons which we needn’t discuss here that phrase struck uncomfortably on her uncle’s ear. His reaction must have been interesting and Sally was intelligent enough to take the clue. Mr. Proctor is no actor. He tried to find out how much his niece knew and the more he probed the more he gave away. By the time they parted Sally knew that those thirty pounds, and perhaps more, were well within her grasp.”

Proctor’s grating voice broke in: “I said I’d want a receipt from her, mind you. I knew what she was up to. I said I was willing to help her this once as she was getting married and there was bound to be expense. But that would be the end. If she tried it on again I’d go to the police, and I’d have the receipt to prove it.”

“She wouldn’t have tried it on again,” said Deborah quietly. The men’s eyes swung round to her. “Not Sally. She was only playing with you, pulling the strings for the fun of watching you dance. If she could get thirty pounds as well as her fun so much the better, but the real attraction was seeing you sweat. But she wouldn’t have bothered to go on with it. The entertainment palled after a time. Sally liked to eat her victims fresh.”

“Oh no, no.” Eleanor Maxie opened her hands in a little gesture of protest. “She wasn’t really like that. We never really
knew her.” Proctor ignored her and suddenly and surprisingly smiled across at Deborah as if accepting an ally.

“That’s true enough. You knew what she was like. I was on a string all right. She had it all worked out. I was to get the thirty pounds that night and bring it to her. She made me follow her into the house and up to her room. That was bad enough, the sneaking in and out. That’s when I met you on the stairs. She showed me the back door and said that she would open it for me at midnight. I was to stay in the trees at the back of the lawn until she switched her bedroom light on and off. That was to be the signal.”

Felix gave a shout of laughter. “Poor Sally. What an exhibitionist! She had to have drama if it killed her.”

“In the end it did,” said Dalgliesh. “If she hadn’t played with people Sally would be alive today.”

“She was in a funny mood that day,” remembered Deborah. “There was a kind of madness about her. I don’t only mean copying my dress or pretending to accept Stephen. She was as full of mischief as a child. I suppose it could have been her kind of happiness.”

“She went to bed happy,” said Stephen. And suddenly they were all quiet, remembering. Somewhere a clock struck sweetly and clearly but there was no other sound except the thin rasp of paper as Dalgliesh turned over a page. Outside, rising into coolness and silence, was the staircase up which Sally had carried that last bedtime drink. As they listened it was almost possible to imagine the sound of a soft footfall, the brush of wool against the stairs, the echo of a laugh. Outside in the darkness the edge of the lawn was a faint blur and the desk light reflected above it like a row of Chinese lanterns hung in the scented night. Was there the suspicion of a white dress floating between them, a swirl of hair? Somewhere above them
was the nursery, empty now, white and aseptic as a morgue. Could any of them face that staircase and open that nursery door without the fear that the bed might not be empty? Deborah shivered and spoke for them all.

“Please,” she said. “Please tell us what happened!”

Dalgliesh lifted his eyes and looked at her. Then the deep level voice went on.

“I think the killer went to Miss Jupp’s room driven by an uncontrollable impulse to find out exactly what the girl felt, what she intended, the extent of the danger from her. Perhaps there was some idea of pleading with her—although I don’t think that is very likely. It is more probable that the intention was to try to arrange some kind of a bargain. The visitor went to Sally’s room and either walked in or knocked and was let in. It was a person, you see, from whom nothing was feared. Sally would be undressed and in bed. She must have been sleepy but she had only taken a little of the cocoa and was not drugged, only too tired to be bothered with finesse or rational argument. She didn’t trouble to get up from her bed nor to put on her dressing-gown. You may think, in view of what we have learned about her character, that she would have done so had her visitor been a man. But that is hardly the kind of evidence which is worth very much.

“We don’t know yet what happened between Sally and her visitor. We only know that, when the visitor left and closed the door, Sally was dead. If we assume that this was an
unpremeditated killing we can make a guess at what happened. We know now that Sally was married, was in love with her husband, was waiting for him to come to fetch her, was even expecting him daily. We can guess from her attitude to Derek Pullen and from the careful way in which she kept her secret, that she enjoyed the feeling of power that this hidden knowledge gave her. Pullen has said, ‘She liked things to be secret.’ A woman I interviewed for whom Sally had worked said, ‘She was a secretive little thing. She was with me for three years and I knew no more about her at the end of them than when she first came.’