Cover Her Face (19 page)

    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 tell, 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 color 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 me 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 began.

    Closing his eyes against the heat and the noise Felix reminded himself sternly that Canningbury was one of the more enlightened suburbs with an enviable record of good public services and that not everyone wanted to live in a quiet Georgian house in Greenwich where the mist came up from the river in white fingers and only the most persistent friends found their way to his door. He was glad when the traffic lights changed and, under Mrs. Proctor's guidance, they moved forward in a series of gentle jerks and turned left away from the main road.

    Here was the backwash of the shopping centre, the women walking home with their laden baskets, the few smaller gown shops and hairdressers with pseudo-French names over the converted front-room windows. After a few minutes they turned again into a quiet street where a row of identical houses stretched as far as the eye could see. Although they were identical in structure, however, they were very different in appearance for hardly two of the small front gardens were alike.

    All were carefully sown and tended. A few householders had expressed their individuality with monkey-puzzle trees, coy stone gnomes fishing from basins or spurious rock gardens, but the majority had contented themselves by creating a little show of color and fragrance which shamed the dull nonentity of the house behind. The curtains showed signs of careful if misguided choosing and of frequent washing, and were supplemented by additional half-curtains of draped lace or net which were carefully drawn against the curiosity of a vulgar world.

    Windermere Crescent had the respectable look of a street that is a cut above its neighbours and whose inhabitants are determined to maintain that superiority.

    This then had been the home of Sally Jupp who had fallen so lamentably from its standards. The car drew in to the kerb at the gate of number 17 and Mrs. Proctor clutched her black shapeless handbag to her chest and began to fumble at the door.

    "Let me," said Deborah, and leaned across her to release the catch. Mrs. Proctor extricated herself and began her profuse thanks which Deborah cut short.

    "Please don't. We were very. glad to come. I wonder if I might bother you for a glass of water before we leave. It's silly, I know, but driving is so thirst-making in this heat. Really only water. I hardly ever drink anything else."

    "Don't you, by God!" thought Felix as the two women disappeared into the house.

    He wondered what Deborah was up to now and hoped that the wait wouldn't be too long. Mrs. Proctor had been offered no choice about inviting her benefactor into the house. She could hardly have brought a glass of water out to the car.

    Nevertheless Felix was certain that she had not welcomed the intrusion. She had glanced anxiously up the road before they went in and he guessed that the time was getting dangerously late and that she was desperately anxious that the car should be gone before her husband came home.

    Some of the anxiety she had shown when they first met her in the churchyard had returned. He felt a momentary spasm of irritation with Deborah. The exercise was unlikely to be useful and it was a shame to worry that pathetic little woman.

    Deborah, untouched by such nice refinement of feeling, was being shown into the front room. A schoolgirl was arranging her music on the piano in evident preparation for her practice but was bundled out of the room with a hasty injunction to 'Fetch a glass of water, dear' spoken in the falsely bright tone often used by parents in the presence of strangers. The child went out rather reluctantly Deborah thought and not without giving her a long and deliberate stare. She was a remarkably plain child, but the likeness to her dead cousin was unmistakable. Mrs. Proctor had not introduced her and Deborah wondered whether this was an oversight due to nervousness or a deliberate wish to keep the child in ignorance of her mother's afternoon's activities. If so, presumably some story would be concocted to explain the visit, although Mrs. Proctor had not struck her as possessing much inventive faculty.

    They sat down in opposite armchairs, each with its embroidered chair-back of a crinolined and bonneted female gathering hollyhocks and its plump unsullied cushions. This was obviously the best room, used only for entertaining or for piano practice. It had the faint musty smell compounded of wax polish, new furniture and seldom-opened windows. On the piano were two photographs of young girls in ballet dresses, their graceless bodies bent into unnatural and angular poses and their faces set into determined smiles beneath the wreaths of artificial roses. One of them was the child who had just left the room. The other was Sally. It was strange how, even at that age, the same family colouring and similar bone structure should have produced in one an essential distinction and in the other a heavy plainness that held little promise for the future. Mrs. Proctor saw the direction of her glance.

    "Yes," she said, "we did everything for her. Everything. There was never any difference made. She had piano lessons, too, the same as Beryl although she never had Beryl's gift. But we always treated them alike. It's a dreadful thing that it's all ended like this. That other photo is the group we had took after Beryl* s christening. That's me and Mr. Proctor with the baby and Sally. She was a pretty little thing then, but it didn't last."

    Deborah moved over to the photograph.

    The group had been stiffly posed in heavy carved chairs and against a contrived background of draped curtains which made the photograph look older than it was. Mrs. Proctor, younger and more buxom, held her child awkwardly and looked ill at ease in her new clothes.

    Sally looked sulky. The husband was posed behind them, his gloved hands leaning proprietorially on the backs of the chairs. There was something unnatural in his stance, but his face gave nothing away.

    Deborah looked at him carefully.

    Somewhere she was certain that she had seen that face before, but the recognition was tenuous and unsatisfactory. It was, after all, an unremarkable face and the photograph was more than ten years old.

    She turned away from the photograph with a sense of disappointment. It had told her very little and she hardly knew what else she had expected to gain from it.

    Beryl Proctor came back with the glass of water, one of the best glasses carried on a small papiermache tray. No introductions were made and Deborah was conscious as she drank that both of them wished her away. Suddenly she wished nothing more herself than to be out of the house and free of them. Her coming in had been an incomprehensible impulse. It had been prompted partly by boredom, partly by hope and very largely by curiosity. Sally dead had become more interesting than Sally alive and she had wanted to see from what sort of home Sally had been rejected.

    That curiosity now seemed presumption and her entry into the house an intrusion which she did not want to prolong.

    She said her "good-byes" and rejoined Felix. He took the wheel and they did not speak until the town was behind them and the car was shaking free of the suburban tentacles and climbing into the country.

    "Well," said Felix at last, "was the exercise in detection worth while? Are you sure you want to go on with it?"

    "Why not?"

    "Only that you might discover facts. I don't believe that she was promiscuous.

    I don't want safety at the price of blackening the poor little devil's reputation further now that she isn't here to defend herself."

    "I think you are right about her," said Felix. "But I don't advise you to make the inspector a present of your opinion. Let him make his own psychological assessment of Sally. The whole case may run into the sand if we keep our heads cool and our mouths shut. The Sommeil is the greatest danger. The hiding of that bottle makes the two things seem connected. Even so, the drug was put into your drinking-mug. It could have been put there by anyone."

    "Even by me."

    "Even by you. It could have been put there by Sally. She may have taken the mug to annoy you. I think she did. But she may have put the drug in her cocoa for no more sinister reason that the desire for a good night. It wasn't a lethal dose."

    "In which case, why was the bottle hidden?"

    "Let us say that it was hidden either by someone who erroneously believed that the drugging and the murder were connected and who wanted to conceal that fact, or by someone who knew that they weren't but who wanted to implicate the family.

    As your stake marked the hiding-place we may assume that such a person specifically wished to implicate you. That's a pleasant thought for you to be going on with."